


Pay the Piper

by NeverwinterThistle



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Chocolate Box Exchange, Consensual Sex, Gore, Non-Consensual Self-Harm, Other, Possession, Xeno, human/non-human - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-06 03:48:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13402818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/pseuds/NeverwinterThistle
Summary: On the brick wall opposite Jon’s flat, someone has graffitied a rudimentary eye, dilated pupil facing his front door. He sees it while taking out his bin on collection day. It watches. There is a faintly accusatory air about it, as if it has seen him shoving piles of paper into the bin bag, each inscribed with the printed eye. They arrive every day. He has not yet managed to see who is delivering them, although he’s thinking very seriously about investing in a security camera. It probably won’t help. What is a camera, if not another kind of eye?Elias confesses to his murders, Jon is back at the Archives, and everything is going wrong.





	1. Homecoming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Laylah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/gifts).



> A whole bunch of your prompts just sort of melted together in my brain, and I was writing before I could stop it (especially the thing about how erotic experiences work for non-humans, and the suggestion that they might not be the same. That really lit the lightbulb. Also, Martin's tarantula). So here's a behemoth treat that I hope you'll enjoy!
> 
> Brief note about those tags: there is violence and gore on a level with what you'd find in canon, as well as several instances of people hurting themselves as a result of entities making them. For once, Michael isn't responsible.
> 
> Canonical up to Ep.88 (Dig). After that I stopped trying to keep it up to date.

**ELIAS**

_This is a statement recorded by Elias Bouchard, Head of the Magnus Institute. I am of sound mind and body, and confessing of my own free will._

_The dead man discovered within my Archivist’s office was killed by me, with a metal pipe that I discovered on the desk. We were old acquaintances; I do not plan to describe the nature of that acquaintance, or explain my reasons for committing the murder. Most of you wouldn’t believe me if I did, and quite frankly, I have better things to do. I am somewhat short on time, you see. As such, I won’t waste words on telling you not to bother looking for me; you will do your jobs, as I do mine. May your futile efforts bring you a measure of enjoyment. You will find I have accompanied this statement with certain proofs of my guilt, should you still harbour any lingering doubts. Make no mistake: I am solely responsible for the murder, and I operated without accomplices. It was, shall we say, a spur of the moment decision._

_One more thing. How does he phrase it? Ah, yes._

_Supplemental._

_It’s all yours again, Jon. Go back to your statements and your painstakingly slow progression. Try to speed things up a bit, won’t you? I’m not the only one running out of time._

_Enjoy the Archives while they still stand. Which, I hope, will be for a while yet. I’ll be seeing you soon enough. Don’t do anything stupider than usual._

_“End supplemental”, I believe is the phrase._

[CLICK]

Jon removes the headphones, wincing as his ears twinge. Carefully, he stows them into the bag at his feet, next to the tape recorder. The train carriage sways around him. The passengers sway with it, like reeds in a breeze. Nobody is looking his way.

Elias’ statement makes about as much sense now as it did the first four times he listened to it. It arrived several days ago, placed on Georgie’s doormat like a gift, a printed note on top:

_I’ve sent copies to the lovely officers at Section 31, as well as your assistants. Consider yourself exonerated. Hold the fort down while I’m gone, won’t you?_

Since then, he has been in touch with the frightening Detective Daisy Tonner. He doesn’t know what kind of evidence Elias delivered to her along with his confession; she refuses to tell him, though he asked several times. He believes her when she says he has been cleared of suspicion. The venom in her voice when she refers to Elias is…too real. Too understandable. Jon has to wonder what happened to prompt it. Maybe Martin will know.

They tell him he is a free man now. He can go back to work. He can go home. He didn’t need to go to all the trouble of _hiding_ , they tell him, as if offended by his lack of trust in their investigative capabilities. Surely he must have known they wouldn’t hurt him.

Jon had no response to give. Instead, he asked if his assistants had been told. They had.

They’ll be waiting for him at the Archives. Martin, Tim, and now…Melanie. _Damn_ Elias. _Damn_ him for dragging someone else into this.

The train rumbles to a halt, and Jon wedges himself further against the corner to let people enter and exit, the mindless flow of commuters blurring past, though he tries to focus on them, to fix them in his mind. But it’s impossible; he can’t memorise all their faces, or any of them at all. He could see them again the next day, and the day after that, and never notice. Facial recognition is not something he’s much good at.

If only he could work out what he’s supposed to be looking _for_. It could be anyone. The businesswoman with her headphones; the punk in his chains and tattoos; the man in the awful checked shirt; the scruffy musician with his instrument case; the student poring over her textbook. None of them meet his eyes. But as soon as he looks away from them, he’s struck by the impression of being watched.

It’s a relief to step off the train at last. Jon hurries his way to the Institute, glancing over his shoulder every thirty seconds or so. Nothing follows him.

“I knew you didn’t do it,” Martin says the moment he crosses the threshold. “I told the police you didn’t, I was _certain_ you didn’t, there was no way you could do something that…uh-”

“Yes, thank you, Martin,” Jon says shortly. “I share the sentiment. Hello, Tim. No need to bother repeating Martin’s assurances, we both know you’d be lying.”

Tim shrugs, unashamed. “Could have been you. After all the paranoia and the stalking, it didn’t seem that farfetched that you might beat a man to death. Surprised it wasn’t one of us, actually.”

 _It was,_ Jon thinks bitterly. _I just didn’t realise until it was too late._ Finally, he turns to Melanie, who stands away from the other two, arms folded defensively over her chest. For a moment, they just watch each other.

“I’m keeping the job,” she says at last.

“And on your own head be it,” Tim mutters.

“It’s not going to be a problem, is it?” Melanie says. “You didn’t object when I was smuggling information out for you. I know I don’t have all the highbrow qualifications you lot require, but Elias said my practical experience would count for a lot. For research and all that. And I’m working hard to learn that…odd cataloguing system of yours, I’m getting better at it. I _won’t_ be a burden. So you have no reason to fire me, even if the man who hired me in the first place turned out to be some kind of…pipe-wielding maniac.”

“Pretty standard in this job,” Tim tells her, falsely cheerful, slightly mocking. “Homicidal bosses, monsters in the basement, hordes of worms that corner you in rooms and munch holes through your skin, it’s all part of the fun. The next best thing’s the really excellent support network. D’you know Martin once spent thirteen days besieged in his own flat, and nobody went to investigate? We’re always looking out for each other like that.”

“Tim, I don’t blame anyone for that, Jane Prentiss sent texts saying-”

“And we didn’t check, did we? Nobody actually _cares_ until you’re dead, and then there’s not even any justice, because the police can’t bloody catch who did it.”

“Not really surprising though, is it?” Melanie says quietly. “Most of the time they don’t believe us. And why should they? Some of the things that happen, that have _been_ happening, they’re so…unbelievable. I’ve given statements. I remember your expression, Jon, after the Sarah Baldwin incident. You looked at me like I’d gone mad.”

“I know,” Jon says. “I’m…sorry about that, I suppose. At that stage I was still very much attempting to at least _pretend_ an element of scepticism. These days, there doesn’t seem to be much point. Yes, you can keep the job. Though as Tim has realised, you really don’t have any other option anymore.”

“So you all keep telling me,” she says.

“And speaking of jobs.” Jon brushes past them. He can feel their eyes on his back; Martin’s sympathetic worry, Tim’s ill-veiled contempt, Melanie’s cautious determination. And beyond them, around them, he can feel the Institute. A shift in the air pressure or the temperature, a familiar smell, or sound; something changed when he crossed the threshold. He has the distinct impression of being welcomed.

He wonders if he was missed.

There is a card in his office. It sits precisely in the middle of his desk, sans envelope, colourless beyond the creamy old-ivory hue of the paper. Bland, but saved from its blandness by an intricate pop out style, layers of paper folding out and around themselves to create a startling three dimensional effect.  It is shaped like a house, although the proportions leave something to be desired. Three quarters of the card is made up by its front door.

“This doesn’t look suspicious at all,” Jon mutters. He digs around in the top drawer of his desk, retrieving a pencil. This he uses to gently nudge the card further open, just far enough to read the message left inside.

“WELCOME HOME!” it reads in spiralling, nigh-illegible calligraphy. “WE MISSED YOU!” It is signed with a simple letter: _M_.

It is very difficult to focus on the front of the card; the details seem to bend and blur, dizzying origami patterns in shades of faded bone. Jon blinks rapidly. The shapes linger on the insides of his eyelids.

No need to ask where _this_ came from.

“Thanks, I suppose,” he says. “You shouldn’t have. I mean it. You _really_ shouldn’t have.” There is no response, for which he is grateful. His heart is pounding.

It takes him ten minutes to locate a second pencil and, very carefully, transfer the card to a nearby cabinet while avoiding any skin contact with the paper. He drops it twice, and both times feels a jolt of terror as it hits the ground with a delicate _thump_.

His shirt is damp with sweat by the time he finishes. He slumps into his chair. It, at least, has the decency to feel unchanged. Uncomfortable in the right places, the upholstery worn and reassuringly familiar. His office is much the same. Cabinets undisturbed. Paperwork piling up on the desk; he recognises a few of the documents near the bottom of the piles, and suspects that although Martin has been trying his best, it wasn’t good enough.

It’s an unfair thought. After all, someone must have scrubbed the blood out of his office floor, and it probably wasn’t Tim. Unlike his paperwork, the floor has been well-tended to. There isn’t even a stain.

Jon glances at his watch. It’s barely gone nine; he’s exhausted. He thinks longingly of his flat, despite never having had much of a strong attachment to it in the past. But after being forced out of it, hidden away for weeks without even his clothes, he finds himself aching to sleep in his own bed for a night.

It won’t really be going _home_ , of course. He knows better now. The Archives are his home. He will never know any other, until the probably-near future when his calling results in an untimely death. Tim, for all his…attitude, is right about some things. There is only one way out of this place.

He can’t justify leaving until a few hours after lunch. But despite all the time spent as a prisoner in Georgie’s flat, aching for his Archives, Jon finds that he no longer wishes to be here. Not in this building, not in these halls, not in this office where Martin has so diligently scrubbed the bloodstains out of the lino, and goddamn Michael left him a _Welcome Home_ card for reasons it will never explain, and even now the back of his neck itches with the sense that he is being watched.

When Martin comes to check on him twenty minutes later, Jon has managed to dig up a statement from the teetering pile on his desk, and is setting up the tape recorder for a reading. They exchange pleasantries; _how are you,_ and _fine. Thanks. Just reading a statement._ Half an hour after that, Melanie stops by with a question she almost certainly doesn’t need answered. Tim is next, reluctant, only staying long enough to say, “Oh _good_. You’re still alive”, before stalking away.

They’re keeping an eye on him, of course. Jon wishes he could appreciate the feeling of being worried about. Instead, he looks at his watch again and counts the hours until he can justify leaving without starting a panic.

His return doesn’t feel like a victory. More like a lull in a battle, the eye of the storm. His allies are dropping around him; the ones that remain are trapped, under constant threat, and unlikely to survive to the end of whatever war they’ve stumbled into. There doesn’t seem to be any way to release them from service. The Beholding wouldn’t let them go. It won’t let _him_ go. He tries to tell himself it doesn’t feel as if the walls are starting to close in. As mantras go, it’s not particularly effective.

After a while, Jon pushes the tape recorder away, statement incomplete. He folds his arms on the desk, dropping his head onto them and closing his eyes. He thinks he might sleep; he’s not sure. The whole time, he can hear the soft crackling of the tape recorder whispering by his ear, long after its cassette should have run out.


	2. Peel

Jon doesn’t enjoy the trip home. He should; he’s a free man, going back to his flat where he doesn’t have to share the bathroom, or be mindful of the hours he keeps, or take care not to eat someone else’s food from the fridge. He should be ecstatic. He isn’t.

He jumps at everything. It’s so strange being outside for such an extended period of time, after the relative sanctuary of Georgie’s flat. In every shop window, he imagines the mannequins turn their heads to follow him. The air smells strongly of rain, though the clouds themselves are patchy, unconvincing. Back on the Tube, he is crushed into a corner by a group of instrument-carrying musicians. There are doors…everywhere.

His neck prickles the whole time. Something is watching.

It’s the strangest feeling, slotting his key into the lock of his door. Guilty, like a child doing something it knows it shouldn’t. He fumbles, and it takes him several tries to make the key fit. It’s very difficult to unlock a door while looking constantly over one’s shoulder.

As he steps over the threshold, Jon almost trips over a pile of paper on the floor in his hallway. Must have been slotted through with the mail; the pieces of rectangular white paper are identical, distinctive where they sit on top of ageing junk mail and supermarket coupons. Jon picks one up.

There is an eye printed dead center of the page. The ink is glossy, wet-looking, as if it just came out of the printer. A quick check reveals that all the other pages are exactly the same. Eye, after eye, after eye.

The message is clear.

With a lump in his throat, Jon begins to check his flat. It seems fine, at first. Nothing disturbed, his possessions as he left them. His bookcase seems untouched, shelving system intact. There is a pile of laundry waiting to be done, and his fridge is full of expired milk and wilted vegetables. The air is dusty, smells faintly stale. It seems normal. Exactly how a flat should look after weeks of abandonment.

He finds the next eye on his kitchen window, a coincidence; it catches the light, and he happens to be looking in the right direction. It’s almost invisible. Looks to be drawn with the tip of someone’s finger, the smears faint against the glass.

After that, he’s more methodical in his searches.

They are everywhere. Eyes on every window, on his bedroom mirror, sketched almost invisibly onto his damn _lightbulbs_ of all places. The television he barely uses is covered in the things. He opens up his personal laptop, stares blankly at the webcam, and closes it again.

They are on the walls, drawn in almost imperceptible HB pencil; he finds the pencil itself in his office, worn right down. On the handles of his doors, on those parts of floor that the carpet doesn’t reach. On the spines of his books, once he knows what to look for. Jon turns obsessive, touching everything, peering into corners and inside drawers, fighting back the urge to turn tail and flee. Or sit down in front of the infested television and cry. Is that what it wants from him? Does it want to watch him break?

In the end, there is only one room in his house which seems to have been left unmolested; the bathroom remains something of a sanctum. He is ridiculously grateful, although it feels like a bribe, a treat, like a biscuit for a well-behaved dog. _Be good, and you can have this._ He wonders if he can justify spending the rest of the evening in there. He can, he decides. Anything to stop his skin from crawling.

Jon runs a bath. Under the sink, he finds an ancient bottle of lavender bubble bath liquid he doesn’t remember purchasing (an ill-advised Christmas gift? From Martin, most likely, not that it matters), and proceeds to tip half of it into the running water. Not so much because he likes bubbles; he’s impartial as far as they’re concerned, and wouldn’t have bothered with them in the past. Now, he thinks about concealment. About hiding. He wants to keep as much of himself from view as possible, and if that means filling the bathtub to overflowing with a thick layer of cloudlike bubbles, then he’ll take it over the alternative, which involves huddling inside the bedroom closet and crying himself sick.

As an afterthought, he also fetches a very large glass of scotch, and fills a ceramic bowl with the contents of a pack of Werther’s Original sweets he finds in a kitchen cupboard. There are no eyes in the bathroom; there are eyes everywhere else. He has every intention of staying in the tub until he at least feels a little less like his skin might crawl right off his skeleton.

It’s nice at first. He can’t remember the last time he was alone like this. Longer still since he last felt fully relaxed. He sips his scotch, unwraps sweets and crunches them with determined good cheer, tossing the golden wrappers onto the floor. It’s his flat; he’ll make as much mess as he pleases. He only regrets not thinking to put on some music ( _not_ a tape, anything but) and bringing a book. There are several rather meaty autobiographies sitting forlornly on his to-read pile. He hasn’t had the concentration necessary to start them. Now, he just might. After he painstakingly cuts out and burns every single photograph featuring people. He remembers Gertrude’s mutilated books. He understands.

Somewhere in his flat, a door creaks. Jon closes his eyes and thinks, _please, no._

“Go _away_ ,” he says out loud. “I don’t have the patience for your nonsensical intrusions, I am _trying_ to wallow in my own misery.”

The laughter reaches him first. It has an odd, unnatural quality to it, as if coming from very far away. Distorted, like a poor-quality radio programme with the volume turned too high.

“One would think you _wanted_ visitors, Archivist.” Michael steps through the doorway, its movements only somewhat uncanny. Still wearing its human costume, the tall blond man with the hands that cut. “Here you are, in the one room without protections. It’s practically asking for trouble.”

“It’s also the one room I’m not watched in,” Jon retorts. “I just wanted a bit of peace and quiet. Just-just an hour or two without feeling like everything I do, or say, is being scrutinised.”

“You can’t have it both ways, I’m afraid. The Beholding might not reach you here, but I am…not so restricted.” It settles down at the side of the bathtub, folding limbs around itself in a way that wouldn’t have been possible, had it possessed anything in the way of a skeletal structure. It watches him. Smiles. He shrinks away from the expression; it doesn’t reach the creature’s eyes.

Unfortunately, looking away means his own eyes are drawn to the bathtub instead, with its unnecessary amount of bubbles. Every single one of which is now somehow reflecting Michael in miniature. He shouldn’t be able to see it. But it feels as though he’s looking through a magnifying glass: each tiny, soapy orb is now a crystal ball that shows his future, and that future holds a grotesque creature with bulbous, bony hands, and a smile that makes him want to drive something sharp into his own eyeballs. A thousand, million tiny Michaels, a dizzying amount; he’s covered in them all, and they just don’t seem to end-

Jon closes his eyes.

“Of course you’d manage to ruin something as outwardly innocuous as bubbles,” he says, when he can.

“I’m…sorry? It really isn’t intentional.”

“You’re a liar.”

“That is a statement of fact. Very astute of you, Archivist.”

Jon doesn’t bother to respond. He finds himself at a loss; he doesn’t know what to do anymore, now his tragic little bathroom sanctuary has been revealed as just as secure as a child’s blanket fortress. Of course he isn’t safe in here. He isn’t safe _anywhere._ In a brief, unnerving moment of painful unity, every single scar from Jane Prentiss’ worms twinges at once. The ache stops as soon as it starts, but he shivers anyway.

Something crunches near his ear, wafting caramel in his direction. He keeps his eyes closed.

“Do help yourself,” he snaps. “No need to wait for an invitation.”

“I never wait to be _invited_ ,” Michael says cheerfully. “Whether or not someone wants me to do anything has no bearing on whether I will or won’t. It’s…irrelevant. _These_ are nice.” The crunching continues. It’s intermingled with an odd crackling sound, like foil being crushed in a hand. For a moment, Jon thinks back to the unnerving folds in the card on his desk, and wonders if he is bearing witness to some strange new fractal puzzle that will no doubt threaten to fry his brain. He wonders if he should open his eyes and look. If it would be a very bad idea.

Something very sharp taps his shoulder, and he makes a strangled, startled sound, flinching back against the bathtub.

“Would you like one?” Michael asks. “I peeled it for you. I noticed you don’t seem to like the skins.”

“How considerate,” Jon says viciously. Against his better judgment, eyes still firmly closed, he holds out a hand. The unwrapped sweet is duly placed into it. “You’re not…eating the wrappings, are you? You do realise you can’t do that?”

“That is… _demonstrably_ untrue. Would you like to see?”

“They’re made of plastic! Or…foil, whatever. They’re not food.”

“They add texture,” Michael says, and it sounds so utterly reasonable that Jon immediately gives up on the argument. Let the monster eat what it pleases; so long as it doesn’t seem inclined to devour _him_ , what does he care? It probably lacks a digestive system. Which raises a variety of unnerving questions that all begin with a _how_ , and end with an extended stay in an institution devoted to recovery from severe mental breakdown. Or a graveyard. Or an endless series of illogical corridors stretching off into the distance.

Best not to dwell on it.

Jon leans his head back against the bathtub, pointedly not thinking about anything related to his exposed throat and Michael’s ‘hands’.

“I suppose you’re still…neutral, did you call it?” he mutters. “Which does raise the question of whether you pull this kind of stunt on others as well. I think I’d rather not know. You _are_ still neutral, aren’t you?”

“Yes?”

“Right. Good.”

“Although, I should… _warn_ you that most of the reason for that stems from all those protections your watchful patron has placed on you. Archivists are difficult to kill, generally speaking. You less so than some. You do…insist on stripping away anything that might be useful, I wonder if you even realise.”

“I, uh-”

“Anyway, those protections only apply to you, so I expect that I’ll return for one or two of your assistants at some point. They got away last time but I…must admit I was more interested in watching what I assumed would be your painful death. I’ll probably kill them next time. Or maybe not. I am prone to changing my mind. On occasion.”

Jon twitches as something disturbs the bathwater. No; the thick layer of bubbles, pushing it this way and that. Drawing, he realises. Michael is drawing. There is a repetitive, spiralling motion to its fingers that gives him a very good idea of what he would see if he opened his eyes, which he refuses to do.

It is very careful not to actually touch him.

“Do you know,” Michael enunciates, still sketching its invisible fractals somewhere in the vicinity of Jon’s left kneecap, “that if I am extremely lucky, I might eventually get to kill you too? It’s a pleasant thought, I…don’t have many wants or desires of my own, you understand, not having any _own_ to apply them to. But. I would like to kill you. I’d do it very slowly. And you strike me as the stubborn kind. Stubborn people last so much longer, it’s very amusing.” It laughs.

Anger wars with fear, and wins out; he might not be a brave man (he isn’t, he knows it, and has resigned himself to the fact), but this strikes him as a bit much. A bit of peace and quiet in the bathtub with a bowl of sweets and some scotch didn’t seem unreasonable; as far as he can tell, he did nothing to deserve this hellish entity showing up and blithely discussing its plans to murder him. Slowly, even. It genuinely sounds as if it thinks it’s doing him a favour. The sheer nerve of it is unbelievable.

“Serve you right if it was the other way around,” Jon says before he can think better of it. “You seem very sure that the Archives will fall, which I suppose would leave me without the protections you keep mentioning. But you might be wrong. We killed Jane Prentiss. Granted, you helped with that, in your own strange way. But next time we might just manage it ourselves. The Archives might come out on top.”

Michael’s laughter rattles the delicate bones in his ears. “I doubt that,” it tells him, “but it wouldn’t trouble me either way, I am…not invested in any particular side.”

“Must be nice.”

“Yes. It is.”

“And I presume this means you’re planning to hang around the Institute for the foreseeable future? Threatening my assistants, opening unwanted doors in the walls, leaving frankly terrifying cards on my desk, that sort of thing?”

“The card was _supposed_ to be welcoming,” Michael says. “I’m sorry if I got it wrong. I’ve never given anyone a card before, so I might be in need of practice. As to the rest, yes. Probably.” It seems to have grown bored with disturbing the bubbles; instead, a silvery crackling sound suggests it might have discovered the abandoned sweet wrappers Jon has been tossing onto the floor. He considers objecting, and decides not to bother. Less for him to clean up.

“Look,” he says instead. “If you’re going to hang around anyway, the least you could do is be helpful. I mean, you’re…on something else’s territory, aren’t you? The Archives don’t belong to you. You’re intruding. And given how short-staffed we are at any given time, it might be nice if you made an effort to help with…things. Gathering statements.” He thinks better of that particular idea as soon as he vocalises it. “Actually, maybe not, I’m not sure I want to deal with the complaints. Or the missing persons reports. But my point still stands.”

“That is an interesting proposal,” Michael allows.

“ _That_ is not an answer.”

“No. It isn’t.”

“Bloody typical.”

They fall back to silence. Jon sinks down in the bathtub until his neck is totally submerged, regretting the cooling water. He’d rather like to get out soon, he thinks. But he doesn’t plan to do so with Michael right there. And he resents the thought of having to beg the creature to please get out of his damn flat, if it’s not too much trouble.

A crunching, grinding noise has him screwing his eyes up tight, teeth gritted until they ache. It sounds like someone methodically breaking down a vase with a mallet. Ceramic being crushed by a mortar and pestle.

 _It’s eating the bowl_ , he thinks, fighting down rising hysteria. _It stole my sweets, it ate the wrappings, and now it’s eating the bowl I put them in, and I have to sit here and listen until it’s done, because that’s what my life is these days. These are the things that happen to me. God, no wonder Tim is so resentful all the time. Nobody should have to put up with this._

Blindly, he fumbles for his glass of scotch. It might just be his imagination, but he’s quite sure something nudges it into his grasping fingers. He downs the lot in one long swallow, cradling the glass protectively against his chest. He hopes the message is clear. _This is my only decent glass, and I would use it for guests, if I had any. Don’t you dare eat it._

Eventually, the awful crunching stops. Jon keeps his eyes firmly closed.

“If you’re finished,” he says shakily, “I’d like to be left alone now.”

“I’m sure you would,” Michael says. “But I’m afraid you’re in the wrong line of service for that; your patron doesn’t leave much room for solitude, it is _always_ watching. Or it would like to be. I think I have a tendency to distort its vision somewhat, I am…not very easy to pin down. I can’t imagine it likes me very much.”

“ _I_ can’t imagine why,” Jon snaps, and then gives a startled yelp as something flicks him in the face. His eyes snap open. But there is nobody next to him; the bathroom is empty, undisturbed aside from the empty space where his bowl of sweets was sitting. From somewhere out in his flat, he thinks he might just catch the creak and click of a closing door. A distant, distorted laughter, like an ill-tuned radio in another room.

He brings a hand to his face. There is no pain; he hasn’t been cut. The droplets dripping down his cheeks are water, not blood. The damn thing _splashed_ him before vanishing. It probably thinks it was being hilarious. Like an overly effervescent dolphin, if dolphins were equipped with giant blocks of knives instead of flippers.

Jon fumbles for the bath plug, careful to keep his eyes far away from the surface of the water. He doesn’t want to see Michael’s newest art project. He lets it gurgle down the drain with the lukewarm remains of his bath, and then runs the shower to rinse off. Successfully fights off the urge to scrub every inch of his skin with bleach.

He finds one solitary gold sweet wrapping, tucked accidentally under the bathmat, apparently missed. For a moment, he considers taking it into the Archives. Recording a statement, filing it as evidence. The temptation is strong. He can’t tell if it belongs to himself, or if he is being pushed to do what is wanted of him. He very much resents that he doesn’t know the difference.

In the end, he throws the wrapping in the bin, and goes to bed early. He sleeps with the covers pulled tight over his head.


	3. Pencil

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement of Karin Mori, regarding events observed during her work as a freelance illustrator for an independently produced children’s 3D stop-motion television show. Original statement given September 6th, 2014. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

**ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)**

I’ve taken a job in a coffee shop in Islington. I’ve been there three months. I don’t much like it; it feels like a regression of some kind, as if I’ve lost all the progress I made since graduating with my degree, and gone back to being a cash-strapped student scraping a living out of part-time barista work. I know I’m overqualified. I have references. Contacts in the business. And with my portfolio, I wouldn’t have to look too far to get work somewhere, even if I went in for something like advertising, instead of movies, which are my passion. I fell in love with the early Disney movies, you know; not just the artwork, but the movements, the fluidity of motion. The way these pictures seemed to spring to life. I started drawing as soon as I could hold a crayon, and I’ve never stopped since. At least, not until…that last job.

I haven’t touched a pencil since. I’m not sure I will again. Even though all I ever did were some character designs and a bit of storyboarding, and I never touched the models. They said I could, but... I didn’t like to, somehow. Now, I wonder if I had…maybe I wouldn’t be here to tell you this at all.

But I suppose I should start at the beginning.

I got the job through a friend, and she said she had it through a work acquaintance. There was an independent studio looking for a freelance artist to help with their project. They already had their basic ideas, and I’d be working under a lead artist who would control the vision and everything. I didn’t mind this. I’ve worked with a lot of indie producers; I like it. There’s a sort of freedom, a sense of…the sky’s the limit, you know? And I’d never done stop-motion, but they reassured me that it wouldn’t matter. I wouldn’t be working with the actual models. They had their character ideas, I would just be helping with designs. A bit of art for settings. And, like I said, some storyboarding, though they said they had a general direction in mind. Basically I was just lightening the load on the art team. An extra pair of hands.

God, I wish I hadn’t phrased it like that. Can we- can you erase that bit? No, you’re right, that’s unreasonable. I’m sorry. I’ll just continue where I left off.

There didn’t seem to be a script. That was the first red flag, though I’m ashamed to admit I brushed it off; some indie producers really value spontaneity, and I wondered if they were hoping the script would sort of build itself organically around our work. Something like that. I don’t personally think it’s a very good idea? All it really does is confuse people. But when I mentioned it to the other people in the art team, they didn’t seem worried. Didn’t seem much of anything, really. Not very social. There were three of us in total; myself-

[SOUND OF A CREAKY DOOR OPENING]

**ARCHIVIST**

Oh, for- do I have to start sticking up signs? _No entry permitted until the Archivist has finished doing his job? Kindly do not barge in at your own pleasure, just to bother me with another inane question that you could have answered yourself with ten seconds’ thought and a spot of initiative?_ I mean, as grateful as I am for all the extra security measures we’ve been taking since Elias’ disappearance, I really think that check-ups every thirty minutes are pushing it a little. Also, didn’t I tell Martin to oil that damn door? I’m quite sure I did.

[UNNERVING LAUGHTER]

**MICHAEL**

Possibly. But I’m afraid it wouldn’t have changed anything. You see, it’s a different door.

**ARCHIVIST**

You don’t say.

**MICHAEL**

I’m…quite sure I just did. Would you like me to say it again? It wouldn’t be an inconvenience.

**ARCHIVIST**

No, _thank you_ , I think I’ve fulfilled my quota of being laughed at for one day. It’s not like you to interrupt a recording, what do you want?

**MICHAEL**

You asked Tim to find you a statement from a Mr. Oliver Nash earlier. He wasn’t having much luck, so I thought I’d be _helpful_.

**ARCHIVIST**

Nash disappeared two months ago; Tim got hold of the missing persons report. How did you find him?

**MICHAEL**

It wasn’t difficult. Mr. Nash and I have met in the past, I…had no trouble finding him again. He was _very_ happy to give his statement.

[EERIE LAUGHTER]

I actually had to stop him, in the end. He was so eager to keep talking. It’s been a lonely two months for him, and it must have made a nice change from the usual, having a reason to talk. I’m afraid he did ramble a bit. You’ll probably find it quite a…boring statement. I did. Sadly.

**ARCHIVIST**

Do you mean you- of course you do. That poor man. He didn’t deserve any of this.

**MICHAEL**

_Deserve?_ Now that is an…interesting concept. Tell me, who exactly decides on that sort of thing?

**ARCHIVIST**

No one, it’s just a figure of speech. And a statement of fact. Nobody _deserves_ what you do to them.

**MICHAEL**

I suppose I could tell you that everyone deserves it, in a way. By the simple fact that you all exist. You are quite _literally_ there for the taking. There isn’t any kind of…cosmic judgment that deems some people more eligible than others. You just exist, and we…help ourselves.

**ARCHIVIST**

Like an all-you-can-eat buffet, except that we’re talking about people’s lives.

**MICHAEL**

That is one way of looking at it. A narrow way. But, a way.

**ARCHIVIST**

I’m not going to argue with you about this. I can’t imagine it would lead to anything productive. Thank you for the tape, I appreciate your assistance. I’d tell you that you might someday make a decent archivist yourself, were it not for the fact that it would be patently untrue.

**MICHAEL**

Yes, it would.

[GRATING LAUGHTER]

**ARCHIVIST**

Ow. You know, every time you do that, it feels like someone’s applying a power drill to the inside of my eardrums. Argh. If you could just stop- thank you. Right. Good. So, you don’t seem to mind getting hold of difficult-to-reach statements. That’s helpful. I’m…not sure I want you anywhere near fact checking. In fact, I’m certain I don’t. How about cataloguing? Any thoughts on that?

**MICHAEL**

The questions you ask, Archivist. I wonder if you even realise how pointless they are. Of _course_ I would be _capable_ of cataloguing for you. But you and I perceive “order” in such different ways. Not that you have to take my word for it, I am…happy to demonstrate, if you feel a need to experience my best attempt at a filing system. It would be…memorable.

**ARCHIVIST**

When you put it that way, I’m afraid I have to pass. That won’t be necessary. Kindly step away from that cabinet.

[SOUND OF SLIGHTLY ECHOING FOOTSTEPS]

So. Definitely no cataloguing.

**MICHAEL**

Is this a _job_ interview, Archivist? Am I being…evaluated? That _is_ interesting.

**ARCHIVIST**

I’m starting to see the error of my ways. This was a bad idea.

**MICHAEL**

Yes, it was, wasn’t it? You do get there in the end, though you have to be led by the hand. Your predecessor was a lot quicker on the uptake.

**ARCHIVIST**

Not quick enough to avoid her own murder.

[EXTENDED SILENCE]

She wasn’t, was she?

**MICHAEL**

You do _realise_ that anything I say to you is almost certainly a lie?

**ARCHIVIST**

I do. I just wonder what that means for the things you _don’t_ say.

[DELIGHTED LAUGHTER, SEVERLY DISTORTED]

**MICHAEL**

There’s hope for you yet, Archivist. Enjoy the statement, won’t you?

[SOUND OF A DOOR CLOSING]

**ARCHIVIST**

Well, I suppose that could have gone worse. Although if it’s telling the truth about the way it obtained this statement, I don’t suppose it’ll be of much use to…me…

Ah.

Right then. I’m not sure how I didn’t notice that happening. Although, considering who- _what_ I’m dealing with here, perhaps I shouldn’t really be surprised. Alright. Let the record note that I am currently staring at the remnants of Oliver Nash’s recorded statement, which has had its tape totally unravelled and distributed all over my desk. And I mean _all over_ , it seems to have found its way under the stacks of paperwork I haven’t touched in months, and some of it is bunched up in my tea. Urgh. Suppose I won’t be drinking that. Also, now that I look closer, I’m almost certain the strands of tape are arranged in a quite deliberate pattern. Almost like…letters? It’s difficult to tell where one ends and the next begins, but maybe if I step back and look at it from a greater distance- 

[SOUND OF A CHAIR SCRAPING]

Yes, that works. And I was correct, I am in fact looking at letters, which appear to read-

Oh. Of course. Whatever else did I expect.

The tape reads, “HELP ME. HELP ME, HELP ME, HELP ME, HELPME, HELPMEHELPME, HELPMEHELPMEHELPMEHELPMEHELP-”

[SOUND OF COUGHING]

I suppose that’s what I get for assuming that I could make Michael cooperate just by telling it to do things. It can’t be treated like Martin or Tim or Sash- uh, Melanie. It is not my assistant. It will not be conscripted or enlisted or…reasoned with. Fair enough. I should probably be thankful that it chose to remind me in a manner that does not involve further stabbing, or some kind of awful maze. This is practically tame by comparison. Like…a gentle bite from a big cat that would prefer not to tear off any hands today, but is only prepared to give one warning. That’s what this is. A warning.

All the same. I wonder what would happen if I rewound the tape? I could do it with a pencil, just as…something to do while I record Ms. Mori’s statement. Stress relief. Keep my hands busy.

I should probably smash the damn thing and burn the remains. Or…maybe not burn them. No. Bury them? No, not that either. I should store the remains in some forgotten cabinet in the Archives, with a note saying, “do not touch, on pain of abject loss of sanity”. That might work. It would be the sensible solution.

Where did I put my pencil?

[CLICK]


	4. Invitation

Days pass.

On the brick wall opposite Jon’s flat, someone has graffitied a rudimentary eye, dilated pupil facing his front door. He sees it while taking out his bin on collection day. It watches. There is a faintly accusatory air about it, as if it has seen him shoving piles of paper into the bin bag, each inscribed with the printed eye. They arrive every day. He has not yet managed to see who is delivering them, although he’s thinking very seriously about investing in a security camera. It probably won’t help. What is a camera, if not another kind of eye?

He makes sure to walk the most heavily populated route to the station, first peering surreptitiously out the windows of his flat, and only leaving when he sees others on the street. He checks faces. He spends too long on the eyes; are they glassy? Do they put him in mind of the fake plastic pupils found on stuffed animals? Or are they real, observing him with expressions of caution, worry, contempt, as he stares at them too long?

A woman asks him what the hell he wants. He doesn’t know what to tell her.

It’s a lovely day, sunny and warm. So why does the air smell like incoming rain? Does he imagine the faintly salty, brackish taste of the triple shot coffee he buys at the station? Possible. But, all things considered, unlikely.

He feels like a cornered animal.

When he gets on his train, he finds it diverted. There has been an incident at Victoria Station, he is told. Explanations vary; passengers mutter about terrorist scares and young punks with their pranks, and cheaply built infrastructure, and what are they paying their taxes for, anyway?

Jon lets himself be herded from the train and onto a hastily organised bus service for diverted passengers. He wonders if this would still be a problem, had he stuck to his usual route to work, the one he has been taking for years. But he changed it, after Sasha…after Sasha. He remembers so little about her. They have no pictures. Nothing aside from her tapes, and her voice. She always took the train to Victoria Station, and walked the extra distance so she could afford a cheaper coffee. He’s started doing the same. He has no other way to mourn her.

But today, the station is closed. Strange that it should be this one, at this time, right when he needs it. Strange that nobody seems to know what’s going on.

“You’re late,” calls Tim as he rushes through the door. “It won’t get you fired, you know. Trust me. I’ve tried that already.”

He doesn’t bother responding. In his office, he drops his bag and reaches for his work laptop. The news is discussing the closure; oddly enough the reports conflict. One site clings to the terrorism explanation; another mentions a burst pipe, a third a gas scare. All the articles have a vaguely bewildered air about them, as if their writers don’t quite believe the words they are typing. Jon reaches for the phone.

Detective Tonner responds on the third ring. “This is Daisy. What the hell do you want.”

“I-uh, hello? I just wanted- Victoria Station. What’s going on?”

She sighs. “Alright, that was fast. I didn’t think you’d call until the end of the day.”

“So there is something going on?”

“Could be.”

“And?”

She sighs again, this time pointedly. Jon waits it out. When she does speak, she sounds reluctant. “Look, I don’t know why they’re bringing in Sectioned officers yet, but clearly they’ve found something a bit weird. And I know you’ll just be tracking us all down afterwards, begging for statements, so. If you wanted to come down. I could pass you off as an academic expert, is all I’m saying. I’ll tell them you’re with us.” There is the implication of an apology in her words, if not her tone. She will never apologise for the murder she would have pinned on him. He wouldn’t expect her to. He himself will never apologise for hiding. They are who they are.

The offer is unexpected, however, and Jon is very tempted. Fresh statements, a chance to find some solid evidence. Maybe even close up a file for good; wouldn’t that be a novelty? He’d very much like to go.

He looks at the pile of work on his desk. Half-finished statements, their cassette tapes all a-jumble. Slapdash Post-its shoved onto work he was too tired to complete. He tries to say, _yes, thanks, I’ll be right down._ The words die unspoken on his tongue. He just can’t get them out.

“Sorry,” he finds himself saying. “I have a lot of work to do, I’m running really behind. I could send one of my assistants, if that’s alright?”

“Great,” Daisy says, unenthused. “Just don’t send me the stammery one who looks like he might cry if you tapped him too hard. Where’s the other one, Tim? Smart. Sarcastic. Send that one out.”

In a fit of pique, Jon decides to make sure Tim is extremely busy elsewhere. “Sorry, he’s not available. I’ll send you our newest hire. We brought her on for her…extensive field experience, you’ll like her. She has a clear head.” None of it is exactly a lie.

Melanie herself is openly enthusiastic, which makes one of them. It is, he realises the first time he’s explicitly requested her assistance for anything. Her work for him while he was still at Georgie’s doesn’t count; they both know it was desperation, that he turned to her as a last resort when Martin and Tim just weren’t options. And since returning, he’s gotten back into old habits. It’s just easier to assign work to the people he knows. Bad enough he keeps catching himself on the verge of calling for Sasha.

But Melanie wants the work, and an excuse to leave the Archives he suspects she might find a bit stuffy by now. Field work is her calling; she handles interviews with a professionalism that Martin lacks, and Tim only shows sporadically. She doesn’t discard details. Something to do with her former profession, he suspects. ‘Ghost hunters’ cannot afford scepticism.

Either way, it gets her off cataloguing and filing for the day. This is a blessing to the person who has to double check everything she does. In this case, Jon. He wouldn’t embarrass her by pushing the job onto colleagues that openly do not want her around.

She’s back by mid-afternoon. He gave her his spare tape recorder for the occasion; she places it on his desk like the most fragile of glass vases. The look she gives him is challenging.

[CLICK]

**MELANIE**

Statements of various personages met at Victoria Station, in the aftermath of a violent event that occurred overnight, resulting in the deaths of nine people, and the temporary closure of the station. Detective Daisy Tonner, just like we discussed?

**DAISY**

You’re so like him it’s scary. Whatever training you lot get put through at your archives, I hope I never have to go anywhere near it. Fine. Statement of Daisy Tonner, in brief because we’re standing in a _crime scene_ , and I’m supposed to be working right now. Not sure I’m even allowed to be doing this, but Basira got away with it. Guess she just never asked for permission.

We’re definitely looking at some kind of incident. You know. The Sectioned kind. From what I can see, sometime after the trains stopped for the night, a group of people got into the station. There were nine of them. We’ve got them all on camera. They arrived together, but not really _together_. More like they grouped up on the way on. It’s odd, they almost look like they’re following something.

**MELANIE**

Sorry, what makes you say that?

**DAISY**

It’s just a feeling. But you’d think if a bunch of people got themselves into an off-limits area after dark, they’d be looking around a bit more, right? They should be fascinated. Everything looks different after dark, and at the very least I’d expect some nervousness, a bit of looking over the shoulder, peering into the shadows. There’s none of it. They’re all looking at something ahead of them while they walk. They talk a little bit, but they don’t even look at each other. There’s something up ahead that they can’t take their eyes off. The cameras don’t show anything. That’s unusual, but…yeah. I’ve seen things like it before, so I’m not as sceptical as I might have been.

Whatever it was, it led them right down to the tracks, where we found them.

**MELANIE**

And you have reports from several passersby, mentioning that they heard music?

**DAISY**

Yeah. Nothing concrete, nobody recognised a tune. They weren’t certain where it was coming from; thought it might have been a radio someone left on inside, maybe. It made them feel weird. Jumpy. A couple thought about calling the police. They didn’t in the end.

**MELANIE**

I should note that I’ve talked to all the witnesses, and I have their statements recorded separately. They all agree on the music, and that it made them feel very strange. When I asked them why they didn’t call the police, they all told me they “couldn’t”. None of them knew why. Personal note, but I’m rather glad they didn’t, actually. I don’t like to think about what might have happened to anyone sent to investigate.

**DAISY**

That makes two of us.

**MELANIE**

I think you should tell me about the victims now. Can you?

**DAISY**

Probably. Some stuff doesn’t…like being talked about, you know. You try to get a report down, or tell a colleague what you saw, and it doesn’t come out right, or you find yourself talking about the weather. But I don’t think this is one of those. Almost feels like it wants to be talked about. Bit of a showman, this one. Not to mention a thief; we’ve done some checking, and none of the victims are carrying their phones. There were definitely one or two when they came in, we have them on footage. But they’ve disappeared.

Anyway, what we have here is nine people, four women and five men. Aged between sixteen and seventy-something. From what we can tell, they followed an invisible entity down onto the train tracks, and then proceeded to beat each other to death.

**MELANIE**

Weapons?

**DAISY**

None. Bare hands only, from what we can tell, though we’ll know more after forensics gets stuck in. We’ve only just started identifying people, but there’s no indication they knew each other. Totally different walks of life, you know? On the camera footage we have, they act like strangers. Like they only just met.

**MELANIE**

So we have nine total strangers who arrived at the station at the same time, and then basically went berserk and killed each other?

**DAISY**

Yeah. No survivors. Which is interesting, because you’d think someone might have come out on top by the end. One or two of them look like they work out. But we found one guy a lying way off from the others, half his skull caved in. Looks like he smacked it against the wall until it cracked. He did that to himself.

**MELANIE**

What…makes someone do that?

**DAISY**

Music, apparently. There are scuff marks on the platform above the tracks. Faint, but it looks like someone set up a few instruments here. Like they were playing down to the people on the tracks. Made themselves a bit of a stage and just went for it. And when they were done, they must have just packed up and left. All the while appearing on none of the cameras.

**MELANIE**

I imagine that’ll make them difficult to catch.

**DAISY**

Pretty standard in this job. After a while you get to know what a lost cause looks like. Pass this on to your boss, just in case he knows something, but I won’t hold my breath.

[CLICK]

“That’s the main statement,” Melanie says, stopping the tape. “I have the supplementary ones in this folder, they’re from the witnesses who heard the music, the cleaners who found the bodies, a few of the officers. Anyone I could grab, mostly. Daisy summarised most of it. Is that alright?”

“This is good work,” Jon tells her honestly. “There doesn’t seem to be much evidence to dredge up, but you’ve done very well with it.”

“I have, haven’t I?” she says. She’s openly pleased; so caught up in pride, both at her own work, and at the praise, that she forgets she doesn’t actually like him much. He wonders about that. The way she assigns more value to his praise when it comes in his role as Archivist, than she would if he gave it to her as Jonathan Sims. “And…I might have something else? I wasn’t sure if I should show you, it’s just so circumstantial, and I know how you get about ‘evidence’ that could so easily have another explanation.”

“I’ll take what I can get. What did you find?”

“This.” She opens the folder under her elbow. Inside is a printed page, displaying what appears to be a screenshot of a forum post. Jon tugs it closer.

_Tonight, the Station. Come when the trains have stopped. All recording devices welcome. PM me._

It is curt, unspecific. It doesn’t bother to list exactly _which_ station is being discussed, or any indication as to exact time, let alone what sort of event is actually being hosted. Still, it raises his hackles. There is something vaguely familiar about the post. And something very, very wrong.

“Tell me what I’m looking at,” he murmurs.

“It’s from an online forum for pop-up shows,” Melanie says. “Like…spontaneous poetry recitals, experimental music, movie screenings. People give warning a day or two in advance, and then they provide the video projector, or the musicians, the entertainment, whatever. And anyone who wants to come is welcome. It’s sort of a way to avoid all the fees tacked on by official venues, though they have to watch out for police, since the shows aren’t generally hosted in legal venues. Thus the short notice. I used to be quite big on this sort of thing? It was a good way to network, you know, in case you ever needed a spare camera, or someone who might…know the ins and outs of getting you into a place with…good locks. Um.”

“Indeed.”

She recovers quickly. “Anyway. I heard a few of the witnesses mention music, even though the station was closed for the night, and I thought…what if? You know? It’d be a pretty cool venue, I’d have loved to do some ghost hunting in a station after closing time. And…I found this. I actually tried to message the OP, but…”

“ _Anonymusic04111918._ Why does that number ring a bell? Never mind, it’ll come to me later. And I see they haven’t bothered to upload a picture of themselves. A new account?”

“Only one post in its history,” Melanie says. “This one. And funnily enough, not thirty seconds after I sent it a message, the post was deleted. We’re just lucky I saved a screenshot, or we wouldn’t even have this. Like I said, it could just be a coincidence, but…I’m not sure. It’s odd.”

“Very.” He gives her back the printout, circumstantial though it is, and tells her to file it with the statement. He can’t remember what it reminds him of. But he’s sure it’s important. Melanie, at least is pleased; she takes proud possession of the case, claiming responsibility for any follow ups that might be required, offering to type up the recorded statements herself. It seems like too much effort to explain that the Archives is not a police force with officers taking on specific assignments. It is not a…YouTube ghost hunting show, which relies on its creators finding and laying claim to individual stories before their peers can steal them and their revenue. Nobody owns the cases here. Only the Archives.

But explaining this would require time and energy he doesn’t have, so Jon agrees with her request. Yes, she will be the main police contact. Yes, he will defer to her with regards to any witnesses that might need interviewing. Yes, she may type it up and file it herself, signing it off in her own name.

It doesn’t matter. But it makes her happy, and so he lets her have it.

An hour passes; he spends it staring blankly at a statement he should be reading, and can’t bear to. The tape player sits at his elbow. There is a new tape inside it, ready to take down the words of yet another unfortunate soul who, through no apparent fault of his own, found himself targeted by beings he could not escape, or even comprehend. Tim has attached a document reporting on his follow up research; as is standard, the statement giver has since passed away. As is standard, the manner was brutal, predictable, and utterly unfair.

The back of his neck itches. Jon wonders briefly how many little eyes he’d find around his office, if he bothered to look. He’s getting rather good at looking for them. Every time he thinks he might have found the lot in his flat, a new one seems to appear. He tells himself he missed it the first time. He doesn’t like to think of the alternative. He’s having more than enough trouble sleeping. Hasn’t completed reading a statement since his return to the Archives; the readings themselves leave him shaky, mumbling his words like he’s pronouncing each one for the first time, losing his place in the script. An impatient pressure is starting to build inside his skull.

There is a spider on the wall.

Jon watches it for a while. It’s large, bulbous, brilliant emerald. Martin would like it. Would probably help it very gently onto a square of card, and then escort it outside to a new home, scolding it the whole time. Jon just watches.

Eventually, it moves. Its swollen body skitters across the plaster wall, its movements jerky, uncomfortably quick. It races its way across the filing cabinets, inside which are kept those statements Jon either isn’t quite ready to file away in storage for good, or suspects he might need again. When it reaches a certain drawer, it stops.

He could almost swear it turns to look his way. Unwanted, a memory of small, silver worms squirms into his mind’s eye. There was a spider in his office. He tried to kill it; accidentally revealed the trap in the walls instead. The spiders have helped in the past. Not everyone, of course. But then, isn’t Michael much the same? Helpful when it suits, not yet openly hostile.

Still, Jon is wary. He’s being hunted; he knows it, though the proof is currently insufficient to convince anyone but the most paranoid. There really are things out to get him. Things that want him dead. Elias may be one of them; any living colleagues of Jane Prentiss would definitely be on that list, as would anything that might prefer he didn’t painstakingly record statements of their hunting methods and put them in permanent archival storage. So, most things. And he has, within the very same cabinets his ‘friendly’ office arachnid is perching on, several statements suggesting that the spiders are by no means tame.

As if he even needs them.

“Hello, ‘Mister Spider’,” Jon mutters under his breath. He pushes his chair back and makes his way over to the drawer.

The spider doesn’t move. He expected it to; it must know that he will kill it, as he kills any spiders he sees, and has done since he was eight years old. Up close it’s larger than he first expected. The green of its back is shot through with black streaks like tiger stripes. They seem to undulate as he watches them, although the spider itself is unmoving. Branching together, flexing apart, trickling outwards to form the unmistakable shape of webbing, imprinted on the spider’s back.

Jon shivers. The creature is definitely watching him. And although it doesn’t speak (it can’t, how could it possibly), he imagines he can hear its silent invitation:

WON’T YOU BE OUR GUEST FOR DINNER?

The webbing tightens. His legs want to move. To follow; he doesn’t doubt that the spiders will guide him, all the way to an old and bloody door, where he will knock, twice, and enter. And he will not be seen again.

In the back of his mind, something pulses; like a muscle flexing, like the passing flash of a lighthouse, like the blink of a large, all-seeing eye. For a moment, Jon feels like nothing more than a channel. Through him, something is looking. The eye has taken his own eyes, his mind, his senses.  It peers out at the world. It sees the spider.

Jon blinks, and the feeling is gone. “It’s watching you,” he croaks. “It watches me, and it’s _definitely_ watching you. I very much doubt it’ll let you take me away from here. Nice try. Better luck next time.”

Spiders don’t sigh, but he imagines a faintly disappointed wilt to its legs.

YOU ARE ALWAYS WELCOME, he hears. And the web is severed. He’s back in control.

All the blood seems to rush to his head, as if he’s stood up too fast from a chair. Blinking, Jon reaches out for something to steady himself. His hand comes into contact with the cabinet. Something papery touches him.

The spider shrieks. There is no other word for the horrifying, high-pitched ululation, small and sharp, that emanates from the creature. Several of its legs come up and attempt to curl around its head. It almost looks as if it’s trying to cover its face, cowering flat against the metal cabinet. He thinks it might be quivering.

Jon looks over at the paper causing so many problems. It sits on top of the cabinet, innocuous, and definitely not where he last put it. A pop-out card, the colour of old bone, its folds a hypnotic spiral he struggles to look away from. _WELCOME HOME_ , it says. Jon blinks.

When he looks back at the spider, it’s nowhere to be seen.

“Christ Almighty,” Jon says, yanking his hand free of the card. It’s harder than it should be, but he’s angry enough to fight its uncanny pull. “If we’re going to have…supernatural dick-measuring contests, can we _please_ not hold them in my office? If it’s not too much trouble?” The last is directed to his office in general, to all the eyes he can’t see but doesn’t doubt are watching him. There is no response. There is never any response, because his master doesn’t have anything to say; all it wants to do is watch. A lot of good that does, when he considers all the things that are out to get him.

Back at his desk, he pulls a half-finished statement towards him. The urge to record is…pressing. Demanding. Needing. And he just can’t do it. He does try. 

He leaves the Archives later than he needs to, though not so late that the light has faded into shadow. The spiders follow him home.


	5. Blind and Deaf

Jon is in his kitchen, making a late night cup of tea.

He can’t sleep. He stares down at the counter, avoiding eye contact. This is difficult; there are eyes in the window, eyes on the walls, the floor, the ceiling. He knows them all so well. He’s found himself starting to look for them, checking on their familiar presence whenever he enters a room. Like a beloved piece of art, or the lovely view from a particular window. Like…old friends.

He hates that this is what he’s come to. Groomed to accept a constant, unblinking gaze that never comments, or judges, but only takes note. Is there a record, somewhere in the Institute? He imagines a closed book in some forgotten room, never read, slowly filling up with ink as it records his every move. This is probably ridiculous; if he really is in the employ of an entity that thrives on watching people, chances are it doesn’t need to actually write things down. _People_ are the ones who need to make records. To remember. He imagines that his omnipresent master has no capacity to forget. But then again, he might be wrong. He doesn’t know.

He does know that it is starting to lose patience with him. He can feel it, though the feeling is not one he can very well describe. It has seen him flip through statements, stopping and starting and tossing them aside, incomplete. And if his hunch is correct, that means the knowledge he should be passing on is instead stagnating on his desk. He gives it fragments, scraps, and leaves it hungry.

What will happen if he continues to fail? Will there be recriminations? Retraining? Will he be put through some awful test of will, and come out the other end a different man? Broken, and remade? Or will he simply be cast aside in favour of one of his assistants? They have all read statements. Every single one of them is perfectly capable of taking his place, and perhaps even doing his job better. Martin has made several offers to read some of his statements for him. Is this some attempt at seizing power? Or is he just trying to help?

One seems as likely as the other, which is a good sign that Jon should just go to bed.

The wind buffets his kitchen windows, though the forecast storm has yet to arrive. Outside, from somewhere in the distant darkness, comes the sound of calliope music.

Jon drops his mug.

It smashes on the floor at his feet, tea spilling across the tiles, staining his slippers. He hardly notices. He’s furious, the last thread of his overstretched patience finally snapped, the whiplash from its passing leaving him simultaneously dazed and determined. Enough is enough.

He fills a bucket with water and soap, and starts on the windows with a kitchen towel. He wipes away the eyes. He cleans the walls, the floors. He moves to the lightbulbs, switching them off and dabbing at the hot surfaces, swearing as he burns his fingertips. When the kitchen is done, he moves on to the living room

He does the bedroom last. In this he is even more fastidious, if possible; he will _not_ be watched as he reads, gets dressed, struggles and fails to sleep, thinks about and doesn’t bother to masturbate. None of these are things that belong to his goddamn _master_. It won’t have them from him. He wipes the eyes away.

Jon emerges from his fevered rage to find dawn starting to break and his flat a lot cleaner than it was before. He hasn’t touched the hallway. It seems a fair price to pay; a bargain struck with a creature that probably won’t understand, but will have to do its best, because Jon is tired of compromises that he always comes out the worse for. He will allow it to watch his hallway, because this might actually be justified; if anything nasty comes in through his door, it might be nice if the…Beholding knew what was happening. If only so there might exist a record of his own violent death.

Exhausted, he goes to make tea and toast for breakfast.

He takes the Tube to work. The trip seems to take longer than usual, though frequent glances at his watch suggest that the discrepancy is, as ever, all in his head. None of the other passengers comment on it, any more than they mention the group of musicians who have, once again, invaded the train, taking up twice as much space as they need to with their bulky black-wrapped instruments; nobody seems to want to stand too close to them.

The train is dusty. There is dirt in the corners and under the seats, and a dusting of silvery sand pooling inside the plastic advertisement casings. Jon surreptitiously tries to wipe it off his coat, but he doesn’t dare do it too often. None of the other passengers have seen. And he doesn’t want to attract too much attention this early in the morning. Eventually, he gives up, and lets the dust settle. By the time his train arrives, his hands have acquired a relentless tremor.

Victoria Station is open once again, with no sign that it was ever closed.

He arrives at the Archives to find an impromptu meeting in the staff room. He doesn’t mean to intrude; he’s heading for his office and happens to pass by, catching the tail end of an outburst, and slowing to listen. Not his fault. The door is ever so slightly open.

“I just think a database should be our first priority,” Melanie insists. “Especially with these… _things_ we’re dealing with. We know there are different types, and they have different servants, or aspects, or whatever they are. We might actually be able to work it out if we could categorise them properly.”

“It’s not our job,” Martin objects. “We take the statements and research them. That’s it! We don’t hunt ghosts and monsters like you do.”

“Well maybe we should. You know, I used to do these ghost profile things anytime we were tracking something new. Like an online file people could check to find out the history and details of the ghost we were focussing on that week.”

“What,” Tim says, “like a monster dating profile? Height, weight, eye colour-”

“Tim, can you not encourage this.”

“No, he’s right, Martin,” Melanie says. “There are…certain questions that tend to come up when dealing with the supernatural? Things people want to know. Is it edible, will it eat me, is it scared of me, should I be scared of _it_ , is it toxic or venomous, can I have sex with it-”

“ _Can I have sex with it?_ ”

Jon closes the door gently, and goes back to his office. He tries not to feel left out. It’s ridiculous; the assistants have always shared their own relationships and in-jokes, separate to their roles within the archives. He doesn’t require them to include him. If he’s honest, he doubts they’d be having quite as much fun were he in the room with them. And he himself has never been altogether keen on large social gatherings, so the separation is ideal. Logical. It should make him happy.

But not many things do, these days.

He tries to focus. His desk has a growing pile of unfinished statements and the corresponding tapes; he looks at them and feels sick. There is a pressure building in the back of his skull. A kind of impatience. He thinks he’d feel better if he could just finish one of them, if he could just do his job the way he always used to. It was so easy, back before he started to grasp what it is that he’s actually doing in reading these awful, awful stories of human pain, death, and loss. Easier when he still believed he could quit.

He picks a statement at random, slotting the cassette into its recorder and finding his place on the printed transcript where he marked it, sloppily, in pencil marks that look as faint as he feels.

He has to do this. And if he does, maybe the eyes will stop. No more deliveries through the mail, no more symbols drawn into his walls and windows, no more presences in his dreams. If he does this one thing, maybe it will let him have a bit of peace.

After a long moment of silence, Jon stands again. He goes over to the filing cabinets where the spider was sitting a few days before. He almost fancies he can see a flicker of skittering, scuttling movement in the shadowy gap where the cabinet doesn’t quite meet the wall.  It wouldn’t surprise him. Like everyone else, the spiders want something. And they’re starting to get pushy.

Well. Maybe it’s time to respond in kind. On top of the cabinet sits the origami oddity, the plain white card with its fractal cover and large, pop-out door. Jon picks it up. It feels warm to the touch; soft like skin. He takes it back to his desk and sets it upright, facing outwards towards the room.

“Keep the spiders off me,” he says, ignoring the instinct that tells him he shouldn’t be doing this, that this is the last power he should want to invoke. “If you’re not busy eating people’s minds, that is. If you can spare the time.” There is no response. It’s only his imagination that tells him he can hear a distant, delighted chuckle.

Sitting down at his desk, Jon clears his throat. He turns the tape recorder on.

“Statement continues.”

**ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)**

After the incidents I mentioned, you can see how I might have started to get a bit nervous about the job. Something wasn’t right. Nobody seemed to care about coming up with any kind of overarching plot, and some of the pictures I was being asked to make were…not what I would have expected. The colour scheme itself wasn’t right either, and I was going through red pencils at a ridiculous rate. I’ll admit I kept at it longer than I should have; the pay was really good, you see, and my sister was due to give birth very soon. We’ve always had a bit of a low-key rivalry, as often happens with siblings, and I know she was our parents’ favourite, with her boring husband and her job at a law firm. I wanted to be able to give her a good amount of money to help with the baby. You know, like a sly little dig at all the comments my family had made about my job as an artist. So, yes. I stayed at the job, though I wasn’t enjoying it. I really started to dread coming into that warehouse.

Things came to a head one afternoon when the lead artist told me to go home early. They were having a meeting, he said, to preview a sequence they’d just finished animating, and talk about the sound design. I wasn’t needed. I could leave now. And then as soon as he’d said it, he turned and left our little art studio, and headed upstairs. Katie, the other member of the art team, went with him.

I thought that was odd; why would she be allowed to go when I couldn’t? She wasn’t senior to me in any way, and I didn’t think her work was as polished as mine. That’s not jealousy speaking. She really was very amateur, like she was still only just learning a lot of the basic techniques. I’d wondered if she was some kind of apprentice, or a family member being trained, but when I asked she only shrugged and said, “something like that.”

You can guess what happened. But I suppose I should tell you anyway: I went to the meeting. Quietly, and I never entered the room. Didn’t have to. They thought I’d left, and so they didn’t bother to close the door to the room where they’d set up all the computers for animation. I just stood outside and peered in.

They were all watching a sequence. It was short, about thirty seconds long, but they played it over and over again. They had some people with them that I’d never met before, wearing headphones and speaking into microphones. Actually, most of the room was full of people I’d never met before. I only really dealt with the art team, and our part of the warehouse was sectioned off with plywood. I’d met the director once, when signing my contract. The rest of the people were strangers.

They were playing this one sequence. It was simple, just a mother and her two sons in a kitchen. Mum’s cooking, the boys are sitting at a table play fighting. Just prodding each other, and bickering. I could hear them bicker, because the people with microphones were obviously recording the voices to add on top.

So the mum turns away from the stove and tells them to, “Be good and give your mother a hand.” And the boys stop arguing. They turn towards the camera, so you can see their faces. They’re grinning. There’s something very wrong about those grins though; they’re too wide, like their mouths have been stretched out and stapled open, and their eyes don’t…move. They say, “Yes, Mother. We’ll be good.”

And then the larger boy picks a cleaver up off the table, and cuts his brother’s hand off.

It…goes on a bit after that. There’s blood spurting everywhere, and nobody seems to notice; they all have those same, unchanging smiles that don’t reach their eyes. The younger brother seems to be crying, but he still. Keeps. Smiling. He just sits there. The older brother passes the hand over to the mother, who pats him on the head and tells him he’s doing a wonderful job, and he’ll be getting a treat for dessert.

Then the sequence starts again.

They kept repeating it, getting the voice actors to do different takes. And I was really in shock, but I could tell that they were going to need a lot of takes, because those actors were bloody awful. Wooden as anything. Almost no emotion whatsoever, they sounded really fake. And then everyone started talking about music. About how it was a good start, but the music would really make it come alive.

I left, but it wasn’t easy. It was like…I couldn’t take my eyes off the scene, though I desperately wanted to. There was this feeling of insane curiosity. This…exhilaration. Almost a sense that what they were doing was…fun. That I might like it too.

When I went to bed that night, it was playing on the insides of my eyelids. I saw it in my dreams.

I expect you’re wondering why I went back to that warehouse. If I’m honest, I can’t really tell you. I just had this sort of need to know, this need to see what the hell was going on. There was some of my art going into this. If I’d gotten myself involved in some kind of…underground adult cartoon, I wanted to know about it. They had _my_ art.

So, I went back the next day. I worked slowly. Didn’t get much done at all, though my boss didn’t seem to notice, and Katie was sitting there doing her own thing, as usual. For the first time, I realised she didn’t seem to take breaks. Neither of them did. I’d sort of assumed they were going off at the same time as me, but I didn’t leave my desk that day, and neither did they. Nobody even mentioned lunch. They just…kept working.

I stayed late. I was actually surprised they left at all; after what I’d seen, I sort of wondered if they were going to stay there all night. Drawing storyboards they never let me look at. But I was wrong; at five o’clock, they both stood up at the same time. Katie told me not to stick around too long. I said I’d be out in ten minutes or so, I just really wanted to finish up this sketch. She nodded, and they left.

The warehouse got quiet, fast. It was almost like someone had pressed ‘stop’ on a recording; one minute there was background noise, the sounds of people moving around, and then the next…nothing.

I stood up, and went to go look around.

It took longer than I’d expected. We were all in a warehouse, and it shouldn’t have been that hard to find things? We only had two floors, and different sections were divided up with plywood. We had lots of sets going on for different scenes. Must have been over twenty. Just…boring things, parks and schools and libraries and kitchens. All the places you’d expect kids to be familiar with. I’d designed a lot of them.

All of them had 3D-printed models in place. Just standing there, frozen in whatever pose they’d been left in when the work stopped. At first it was innocent things. Playing sports, doing homework, throwing a stick for a dog.

That didn’t last.

They were all such mundane settings. That’s what really got to me. Normal, everyday settings, and I’d helped create so many of them. They’d been…ruined. Twisted. A massacre in the middle of a game of cricket, a swimming pool brimming with blood, a classroom with students trying to…eat each other, I just-

Excuse me.

I…

I’ll-

I think I need to skip this part. I’m sorry.

After a while, it felt like I was wandering through a maze. I kept hitting dead ends and having to turn around; I hated that, because it meant turning my back on the models. None of them moved, of course. I just didn’t want them behind me.

When I reached the end of the warehouse, the director was waiting for me, and so was the exit. The doors were open, and he wasn’t standing between me and them. He was just there, at a desk with a 3D printer, which was working on more models. Clutter all over the place, sketches pinned to the walls. It looked normal. But I didn’t believe in it anymore.

I didn’t know what to say. He just stood there, watching me. He wasn’t a large man. Maybe the same height as me. But he always dressed in a suit several sizes too big for him; the fabric hung off his shoulders and arms, like loose skin.

“You shouldn’t be peeking, Ms. Mori,” he said. “You mustn’t see it before it’s done, it’ll spoil the surprise. You can’t possibly appreciate it until it’s finished.”

I was shaking like a leaf, but I let him have it. I told him his show was messed up. That it was really harmful. He might have made it for adults, but the art style looked like something toddlers might watch, and what if they stumbled on it on YouTube or something? What if children saw this violent, awful thing?

“I very much hope they do,” he said, and my throat dried up. “Teaching is such a rewarding experience, wouldn’t you agree? I would like to try my hand at teaching. Of course, what you’ve seen so far is only the roughest of products. It’s just stage dressing. The real performance begins soon, when we add the music. The music will tie it all together.” He reached for something on the table. I was already backing away towards the open doors, and at first I thought he’d gone for a gun, so I was ready to make a break for it. But he held the thing up. It was a flute.

“I’m a musician myself,” he told me. “I composed the score we’ll be using, and I’ll be performing in it. It’s quite good, if I say so myself. Very moving. Very…inspirational. I hope the viewers find that it inspires them to act.”

And then he lifted the flute to his lips, and stopped. He asked me if I’d like to hear.

I ran.

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement…ends.

As usual, investigation has turned up very little. The warehouse space that Ms. Mori and her colleagues worked out of was rented by a company called Piper MediaWorks, for which no records can be found. Rent was paid in a timely manner, thus being unremarkable until the payments abruptly stopped, and all forwarding addresses of both physical and email varieties proved no longer to exist.

Melanie stopped by to investigate a few days ago. She says she didn’t find much; just a wide, empty warehouse, without furniture or decoration of any kind. It could have been used for anything. She did bring back a small bag of plasticky scraps she found on the floor; we’ve sent these off for analysis, but Melanie believes them to be consistent with the offcuts of 3D printed models. She also managed to locate a single red watercolour pencil, tucked away in a corner of the warehouse. It is hardly enough to convict in a court of law, but I think we can say for the moment that Ms. Mori’s tale has merit.

Further attempts to contact her for follow up questions have met with mixed success. Ms. Mori can only be reached through her parents, who are now her legal guardians following her release from a special hospital for patients with mental health problems. She was admitted as a result of an unprecedented episode of self-harm, during which she punctured her own eardrums with a sharpened HB pencil while watching television one night. Her mother agreed to pass on our enquiries, to which Ms. Mori responded with the following message:

_It was on TV. One minute I was watching Doctor Who reruns, and then there was an ad break and it started to play. I recognised the models as soon as I saw them. And when the music started, I knew what was going to happen, so I ran for my art kit. I always keep my pencils sharp. I had to do it, because my sister was staying with me for a few days while her house was fumigated for an insect infestation. She was in the other room, breastfeeding her baby daughter. My new niece._

_I had to make the music stop. I liked it too much._

She has asked not to be contacted further, and we will respect her wish. She has no prior history of self-harm or mental illness.

End recording.

[CLICK]

Supplemental.

Well, I…did it. Finished recording a full statement, the first since my return. And, as predicted, I feel a bit better. Lighter. A bit less like my head might explode if I delay the reading any longer, which might mean I actually manage a full night’s sleep for once.

It surely cannot require more than one a day. Even just the half statement has left me…exhausted. Now that I think about it, I realise that a recording always tired me. But this is different. More extreme. As if it needs more from me than before, and expects me to be able to give that extra…something. And I can’t do it. I can’t.

I’m not as strong as I need to be, and I’m afraid of what that means. For all of us.

End supplemental.


	6. Blood/lust

Jon takes the Tube home.

It’s…quiet. Peaceful, he would say, if not for the fact that he would rather not tempt fate with the way his luck is these days. But there is no dust on the train, no spiders in the shadows, no odd tilt to a shop mannequin’s head or glassy expression to a stranger’s eyes. The air smells as it should; food, people, city. The back of his neck doesn’t prickle.

He actually bothers to stop and get groceries, cooking himself dinner for the first time in…ages. He can’t remember the last time he subsisted off anything other than greasy takeaways and stale sushi. The flat feels safer, sans eyes. The ones in the hallway are fine; he can live with those, and they might one day prove to be useful. The rest of the place belongs to him. His master doesn’t bloody need to see every book he reads, every documentary he watches, every night he spends working on the couch, unable to sleep.

Sometime between washing the dishes and choosing a book for the night, he actually bothers to unpack his work bag.

There is a cassette tape in the front pocket. He’s never seen it before.

For a moment, he just looks at it. No label, no indication of ownership. It’s the same brand as the ones he uses at the Archives; could have fallen in by accident, or come from one of the assistants. Could be another prank from Tim. A sampling of Martin’s poetry. One of Melanie’s witness statement tapes. He might have put it there himself; he’s been getting very absent-minded these days, the result of sleepless nights and constant paranoia. It could have come from anywhere.

It could be from Elias. Another statement like the ones delivered to him at Georgie’s. A reading by Gertrude. It could be anything, but mystery tapes are hardly a strange occurrence these days, and he doesn’t think twice before slotting it into the tape recorder he keeps at home, and leaving it on the bedside table.

He gets ready for bed. Makes himself a sandwich for the next day, takes an unusually leisurely shower, and collapses under the covers. He doesn’t bother with clothing of any kind; the nights are warm, and he resents having to pay for air conditioning when he doesn’t especially need it. It’s not like he shares the flat with anyone else. Might as well enjoy the solitude in every way possible.

Switching the bedside lamp on, Jon reaches for the tape recorder. He starts the tape.

For a moment, there is silence. Then the music starts.

It’s beautiful, in a raw, unadulterated fashion that seems to cut through any pretensions at culture and musical preference that Jon might lay claim to. There is a shivering wildness to its keyboard and strings; the flute sings glassy notes that slice its fellow instruments in half.

It starts off soft. Jon reaches for the volume switch, letting his hand fall as the sounds become louder. Even so, he leans in to catch them more clearly. They rise, like a tide, or the start of a hurricane. They begin to _howl,_ as if their musicians were playing them with aching, bleeding fingers, suffering at every note. Yearning to suffer. To witness each other’s suffering.

Jon can see them in his mind’s eye, rising from their seats in the orchestra pit, pushing sheet music and stands aside, song forgotten. No, not forgotten: changed. This is a new crescendo. The violinist, slamming her wooden instrument rhythmically into the pianist’s skull, until both split and crack open in glorious harmony. The conductor, wielding his sticks like knives, stabbing at a cellist’s kidneys as she claws his throat bloody, both their movements keeping perfect time. A clarinettist raises his instrument, tilts his head back like a sword-swallower, and begins to force it down his own throat. The sounds he makes are…indescribable. Exquisite.

The flutist stands apart. Its face is indistinct; its loose brown clothes flap around it like faded flesh. It plays. Its notes dance around the screaming accompaniment. A fallen guitarist grabs for one of its legs, pleading as three of his colleagues seize him by his flailing limbs, and start to pull.

The flutist keeps playing. It extricates its leg with a graceful, pointed kick that breaks the guitarist’s nose and jaw. The melody it plays is joyful.

 _Yes_ , Jon thinks. _God, yes. That’s what we’ve been missing; that’s where we’ve been going wrong. Why didn’t I see it? Why did I waste so much goddamn time being afraid? There’s the answer._

His kitchen is fairly bare of implements, but once, in a fit of short-lived inspiration, he purchased himself a knife block. He finds it again now, his fingers slipping sweaty on the handles. Some he has never used; they stick in place, and he doesn’t bother to force them. Several slip out easy; the carving knife, the paring knife, the bread knife. He won’t be needing more. These will do. The music doesn’t mind what instruments he brings. It asks nothing more than participation.

 He takes the knives with him, sitting down on the edge of the bed. The carving knife proves blunt, the paring knife is uninspiringly small. The bread knife, however. That pleases him. It pleases the music. He starts to saw at his left hand.

Somewhere nearby, a door creaks. Jon freezes, tugging the knife loose from his wrist. Distantly, he feels it start to ache. To bleed thickly down the back of his hand.

 _Intruder_ , he thinks. Once upon a time, that would have scared him: he is not a brave man, and he knows it. He accepts it. Once, he would have been fumbling for his phone, bawling for the police, long dead by the time they arrived. He’s ashamed of that now. Such cowardice. There is no _need_ , when the answer is so simple. All anyone has to do is follow the music.

Knife in hand, he charges down his target.

It laughs.

“You…don’t possess much in the way of self-preservation instinct, do you? First the binding table, and now…” Michael leans away from the knife Jon swipes at its face. A dizzying movement; its spine should not be able to bend that far back. But it does. “Far be it from _me_ to lecture you on appropriate courses of action, I just… _question_ whether this is really something you want to do. Attack me, I mean. Surely you remember what happened last time.”

Distantly, Jon does. The scar gives a twinge he can somehow feel through the fog of music; jagged, bright, like lightning on a backdrop of cloud. For the briefest moment, he has clarity.

“Help me,” he whispers. His voice sounds nothing like it should. He can’t keep his arm, his knife, from slashing at Michael’s torso.  He can’t control himself, and it terrifies him. The music plays on. “I can’t stop it.”

“You can’t,” Michael says agreeably. It knocks his clumsy attacks aside with fingers that suddenly reach too far. “That’s the point. Pay the Piper its due, that sort of thing.”

“Grifter’s…Bone.”

“It doesn’t _matter_ what you call it. Names are meaningless, I’ve told you this before. It’s not as if you can…put us all in nice, manageable boxes, just by applying a name. Labels will not stick. You do not make me a _who_ just by using a name. The same is true for the musician whose work you are currently so entranced by.”

The brief presence of mind is fading already, but Jon remains aware of several things. The weight of the knife in his hand; he could no more let it go than stop his own heart. It feels intrinsic. Like a vital organ, sealed to his skin and muscle and bone, an essential function of his continued life. And it has needs. Logical needs, same as any other part of the human body; his mind needs intellectual sustenance, the rest of him needs food, water, exercise, sleep. And the knife needs blood. Death. To pierce, slice, slit open the external packaging, and let the insides steam against the open air. Michael’s, or his own. It doesn’t really matter. The knife doesn’t care who it cuts. The music doesn’t mind who joins in for the chorus. All are welcome.

He is aware that one of them will die tonight. And he is almost certain it won’t be Michael. It doesn’t matter: the music doesn’t care.

“I _could_ make it stop,” Michael says. It laughs; an eerie echo that bounces off the walls, growing in volume. With a casual flick of its hand, it swipes the knife from Jon’s fingers, tossing it away. He screams as his knuckles split open at the brief moment of contact. Two of his fingers are bleeding where they grazed against Michael’s cutting touch. “I probably will; this really isn’t the best time for you to die, and anyway, I…would resent it if anything else got the pleasure of killing you. And in such an impersonal way. It seems a shame, somehow. Yes, I suppose I’ll save you. Again. Presumably, you’d prefer the method that leaves you both alive and in possession of…some of your faculties? Such as they are?”

It doesn’t seem to expect an answer, and doesn’t get one; bereft of the knife, Jon claws at its face with fingernails, scraping harmlessly off its cheeks. He tries again. His nails are in their usual state, blunt and bitten to the quick. They leave no mark on Michael’s…skin.

He avoids the eyes. Fogged as he is, hungry as he is, there is within him a deep, unrelenting tide of knowledge that tells him, _no_. The eyes are sacred. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t question. He claws at Michael’s neck with futile fingers. It doesn’t even bother to shrug him off; its skin is as tough as treated leather, yielding oddly as he presses against it, but it will not split, or bleed, or bruise. He would have more luck scraping bark from a tree trunk.

Finally, Michael grabs him by the wrists, encompassing both in one hand. The dissonance between sight and feel render Jon dizzy enough to ignore the stabbing pain in his wounded wrist. Michael’s hand barely looks large enough to hold him so easily. He closes his eyes. He feels as if he just shoved his wrists into a very, very sharp vice. Or between the blades of a guillotine.

“Pay attention, Archivist,” Michael says. In response, the old stab scar begins to ache again, pulsing like a heartbeat. The music fades a little. Jon gives a ragged, grateful groan.

“Please,” he says, through a throat that feels raw from screaming. Scraped from the inside. “Whatever you have to do. Deafen me, or…take me somewhere I can’t hurt anyone. Don’t let me leave this flat.” _My neighbours have children_ , he thinks, and regrets it immediately; the thought had not crossed his mind before, but now he remembers. Now, the music knows. It floods the inside of his skull, pushing and pulling at his mind. His fingers twitch in Michael’s hold. He longs for the knife.

Michael laughs; a seemingly endless sound, high and relentless, weaving through the music in Jon’s mind. He clings to it. There is madness there, but it’s of a kind he prefers to the alternative. He tries to make himself go limp in Michael’s hold.

“It’s a shame you removed all those protections,” Michael tells him. “The Beholding would have…mitigated the effects. You might not even have noticed them. Stupid of you, really.”

Jon thinks about the eyes, sketched invisibly onto his windows, his mirrors, his lightbulbs, his walls and floors. Protections. He _knew_ that; Michael itself told him, the first time it came by. But all he could think was that he couldn’t stand being watched anymore. He wanted peace. Instead, he’s gone and left himself wide open to attack, and nothing in the Archives can help him now. Instead, he’s stuck with Michael, at the mercy of its mad laugh and its knife-like bone hands.

It’s still a better option than the music.

He feels himself being turned around, nudged back towards the bed.

The tape is still playing where he left it, lying on the bedspread next to his knives. Covetous, Jon hungers for them; the dim light of his bedside lamp catches the metal, polishes it to a shine, and he reaches like a starving man for sustenance.

Michael notices, of course. It stretches past his lunge with one impossibly long hand, taking both knives and tossing them carelessly over its shoulder. There is no corresponding sound of impact. Jon finds himself shoved face-first onto the bed, hissing as the force of its push jabs against his spine, bruising. He rolls onto his back, already cataloguing options. His nails have left no mark, but he will try them again, and again, until they carve organic troughs in Michael’s unnatural skin; in those troughs, the music will take hold, grow, bloom and propagate. And if nails will not suffice, he has options. Teeth, strong and healthy. More knives in the kitchen. Plenty of sharp edges, his bedside cabinet and the wooden frame of his bed, the chest of drawers on the other side of the room. Edges to beat skulls again, to drum percussions until the cracking begins. He will make this creature bleed. He will open up holes for the music to flood in.

Michael is on him before he can do anything more than bare his teeth and fix his eyes on its throat. It takes him by the hair; this time he howls, tries to pull free, his scalp burning hot and painful. But he can’t get loose, and finds himself hauled bodily up the bed, abruptly left to fall back into the pillows.

At some point, the tape player stopped. He can’t tell when. It hasn’t dimmed the music in his skull. The flute plays on, nudging him this way and that, whispering its requests.

When Michael rests a hand on his throat, no doubt to hold him down, Jon thinks,

_Yes. Bleed._

He pushes against its fingers, as sharp as a dozen barber’s razor blades, and grins as they bite into his skin. The music pulses. It doesn’t care who sheds the blood. Either will do.

Michael yanks its hand back; the expression on its face is disdainful.

“ _That’s_ not going to work,” it observes. “How unfortunate. It would have been easier on you. Your mind would have…recovered sooner. What a shame.” Abruptly, the expression fades in favour of a grin, a laugh that makes the windows and lightbulbs buzz. The bedside lamp gives a threatening flicker. “We’ll just have to do things with…a few less illusions between us.”

And without warning, the blond man disappears. What it leaves behind is nothing remotely human.

“For what it’s worth, I’m…sorry for any mental trauma this will probably cause you,” the thing that goes by ‘Michael’ says. It straddles him then, pinning him with a weight that far exceeds what its slender, limp frame should manage. “Nightmares and such.” Its hands are the size of its torso; the irregular, needle-like fingers are easily as long as Jon’s forearm. His muscles contract involuntarily; shocked spasms. Reflexively, he sobs in fear.

But there _is_ fear; he realises it immediately, as the force of it pushes back the music, cutting the invisible ties around his neck that seem so determined to force it up against Michael’s sharpest edges. He slumps back into the pillows. He’s afraid, and he hurts, from dozens of different wounds he can’t place. Even the scars from Jane Prentiss’ worms pick that moment to flare up and twinge in sympathy. Everything hurts.

But unlike the music, he can think through pain. And fear. He’s gotten very good at thinking through fear.

“I’ll take the nightmares,” he grits out, and the words sound much like a promise. Above him, Michael tilts its head at an angle that would have snapped a human neck. Jon makes himself look. It horrifies him; he clings to the horror. For the first time, he realises how hard it is to focus on Michael’s face. Does it have a face? “At least I’ll be alive to have them.”

“That is…something of a silver lining,” Michael agrees.

It traps him in between its thighs, settling its impossible weight against his pelvis, his bare hips. Its skin is oddly cool. Leathery to the touch, glossy in the lamplight. There are patterns underneath, barely visible as they catch the light and shiver away from it. Repeating loops, curving divergences, the neverending spiral that coils under its skin. Changing as it moves. As it-

“You-You’re breathing,” Jon says, startled.

Despite the terror that lends a tremble to his hands, the song inside his bones that whispers, _bleed_ , he reaches up for the space where Michael’s lungs should be. Where they might be; his fingers meet no sign of any organ, no heartbeat he might use as an anchor to keep him balanced during this encounter. A heartbeat, he could relate to; it would have signified life. There is none. But still, there is definite breathing. He spreads his hand against Michael’s chest, pushing as it yields. Like sinking into a stuffed leather armchair. Except that there is no end, and his arm is buried almost to the elbow in Michael’s chest before he decides to pull free.

It laughs at him. He expected it would.

“You’re _breathing_ ,” he repeats. “Actual breathing.”

“That is a statement,” it counters, teeth flashing as it grins too wide. “With…some degree of accuracy. From a certain point of view.”

“Mine, presumably.”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t plan on clarifying at all,” Jon says. His hand still hovers in the air by Michael’s chest. He doesn’t know what to do with it. Doesn’t want it anywhere near those knife-like appendages. After a moment, he drops it down to one of the creature’s thighs, touching tentatively. He feels something move in response, subsurface; some foreign muscle that twitches, coiling to meet him.

The spark of fear is back. He welcomes it. The more familiar he gets, the less he is afraid of Michael, the louder the music sings in his mind. The reprieve granted by Michael’s true form is only a temporary thing. Bad enough that its weight on his thighs, the buzz of its laughter that vibrates under his bare skin, is far from unpleasant. He’s aroused already, growing half-hard, increasingly sensitive. There is a heat beginning to spread through his veins; certain primal drives awakening from their dusty enclosures.

Unfortunately, lust is a door that opens both ways, and the music flows through it like water. He’s starting to ache again. Starting to feel the possibility for violence in his hands. He digs his nails hard into Michael’s thigh.

“This is going to get messy,” he warns.

“Yes,” Michael says. “For both of us. If that helps.”

“A bit?”

It laughs at him, flashing bone-white teeth in a face that…isn’t. And then raises itself up onto knees that have far too many joints, and yet no visible bones; Jon shivers as his cock brushes one of its inner thighs.

He doesn’t know how they’re going to do this, he realises. Doesn’t know what will be required of him, what will be taken, or given, or whether he will even be able to comprehend what Michael intends for them both. There doesn’t seem to be any compatibility. He struggles to focus on any part of its body that isn’t the hands, the long fingers jutting out at unlikely angles, like an ill-kept rose, thorns growing wild. It should be an obvious question to answer, but he can’t tell for sure if there is any kind of genitalia present at all.

A part of him wonders if this is intentional; if Michael intends to fuck with him in every possible way, as some kind of payment for the rescue. He wouldn’t be surprised. Aroused as he is, he can’t even bring himself to care. He runs a hand up Michael’s thigh, pressing in deep, hissing as corded…muscle writhes in response. The flute is back, rising in volume, and all the pain fades away under its eerie whistle.

 _Bleed,_ it whispers. _You’ll like it._

He tries to focus on Michael’s face. To find connection, familiarity. Something he can touch, and be touched by. There is a slender neck, a head, a…head. Flashes of teeth, eyes, an absence of either, an excess of both. He doesn’t know. All he can see is distortion. This is not a sight he’s meant to witness, and come out of _sane_. And yet, he needs to. They both need him to. He’s not sure how he knows that last part, only that it’s true.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks through gritted teeth. His molars grind together; saliva coats the inside of his mouth as the flute music whispers, _bite down on your tongue. Sever it._ He swallows hard.

Michael extends one misshapen hand, dragging its nails across Jon’s ribs. He hisses as his skin splits. A sharp, high pain. Like the notes of a flute. “To help you,” it tells him. “It is…too soon for you to die just yet, the conclusion would be unsatisfying. For me, at least. And though the others disagree, I maintain that you are…promising. You’ll get there, Archivist. And won’t it be a sight to see?”

“I don’t know.”

“No,” Michael agrees. “Not yet. You should close your eyes now.”

Laughter threads its voice, an arrhythmic pattern of emphasis that makes it so unnerving to listen to. Jon suspects that it means for him to pick up on the irony of anyone asking the Archivist to close his eyes. To intentionally avoid witnessing. The request should be ludicrous.

He does it anyway.

There is no darkness behind his eyelids. Only repeating fractal patterns, mirrors to the ones he has seen under Michael’s skin. But scattered, split apart, writhing around something light and swift and sharp, like a ribbon with teeth. It should not be possible to visualise the sound of a flute. But Jon is doing just that. There is…some kind of struggle going on. A battle? A contest? A squabble between two hyenas over the last, bloody chunk of carcass meat?

He shudders as stripes of pain bloom across one of his thighs, but the cuts are light, nudging. He lets himself be coaxed into spreading his legs. He can still feel some of Michael’s unnatural weight against him, and the odd caress of its skin, soft as leather. His entire body feels wound up like a wire. And against all odds, he’s still aroused, unbearably so; his cock is heavy against his stomach, twitching with every shift in Michael’s skin. He wants it, badly, in whatever form it chooses to take. God, he wants it.

In his head, the flute music takes on a furious dissonance. His fists clench of their own accord, one of them rising in a futile effort to lash out at the creature he knows should be within reach. He wants to hurt it. To bleed it. To open its chest and empty it of its unnatural stuffing, to feel inside its skin for bones and sinew, to draw spirals with its blood for ink-

A tight heat envelops his cock, slick against his overly sensitive skin, and Jon howls, arching back against the mattress. His breathing comes in gasps, terrified desperation. He doesn’t dare open his eyes. His hands make a wreckage of the sheets underneath him. He very badly wants to buck up into that heat, and even as he thinks this, he realises just how deep it takes him in. His thighs press flat against Michael’s, that ripple of odd muscle pushing back against him. He’s been taken to the hilt, and it feels…effortless.

“Oh,” Jon whispers. “Oh…god. What…” his voice trails off; he needs the breath more than the questions. He’s lightheaded, dizzy, flute shrieking in his ears, and Michael is laughing again. Its humour pulses through his skin, like bass from a distant nightclub, like waves crashing on a cliff face. A relentless rhythm that starts as sound and morphs into feeling, and Jon realises too late that it is moving against him. On him, around him.

He’s never felt more powerless in his life.

He opens his eyes.

Above him, Michael is an incoherent blur of shapes and spirals, its body a spineless undulation. The one point of clarity lies in its hands; they wander across his skin, touching his neck, his chest, his ribs. If they cut him, he no longer feels the pain. The fear is a different story. It runs through his veins like hot wire.

It strikes him, looking up at Michael, that this creature is the kind of indescribable, inhuman horror that would prompt worship, if worship was what it wanted. It doesn’t, clearly. It doesn’t need something so mundane. And still, he wonders if it would accept a bit of worship from him. He’s crossed a line, here. Broken down the instinctive taboo; disgust has been distorted, reshaped. Now, he just wants.

It sees him looking. Sighs, the sound shot through with laughter. “You would have been wiser to keep your eyes closed,” it tells him.

This time, he laughs right back, though his voice is ragged, torn. “No need,” he says. “Apparently. God, you are…something else.”

He’s surprised it. For a second, he can make out something face-like in the general vicinity of its head. There isn’t quite an expression, but he catches a distinct startled feeling. Then an impression of teeth, as long as his arms. And then no face at all.

“You are an…interesting one,” it tells him. “Well worth the trouble of saving, I’m…constantly surprised by you. Suit yourself then, Archivist. If your mind can handle it, then by all means. Feel free to watch. And to fear.”

“What?”

It shrugs; he assumes the gesture is a shrug, though the ripple through its shoulders is an unnatural, boneless thing that hurts to look at. “It’s not compulsory, I…am here to help you, after all. But I would enjoy it more that way.”

It wants him scared. He should have realised this by now; what else does he have to give it? Not affection or love, awe, respect. Not much in the way of pleasure. He might lose himself in its impossible, indefinable body, as much as is possible, as much as he can comprehend, but Michael is at its happiest inside his mind. It feeds on the feeling behind the ice in his stomach, the tightness in his chest, the sweat and blood on his palms that smears as he rests them on each of its…knees.

Now he knows what to look for, he can see: the little shiver that passes up Michael’s frame, as every renewed movement of its ungainly body sends a rush of terror down his spine. It’s taking from him. The flute music; his fear; every helpless, clumsy thrust of his cock. It takes and twists and turns it all into spirals that pulse like muscles under its skin.

“Alright,” he whispers. There’s blood in his mouth; he’s bitten his lip raw, without even noticing he was gnawing on it in the first place. “I’m scared. I- oh, _god_ , I’m definitely scared. Having fun yet?”

“Yes,” it tells him, its voice threaded with a laugh that aches inside his teeth. “Just as much as _you_ are. It’s interesting, I…don’t usually share the entertainment. This kind of mutual exchange is very different.”

“Human, even,” he tells it, and it throws its impossible head back to laugh. Jon groans as something vaguely muscular tightens around his cock, the flex of an organ he has no name for, pulsing in time with Michael’s laughter.

“Not human, Archivist,” it says as he shivers beneath it. “Surely you noticed.”

“Yes,” is all he can manage before Michael arches over him, lunges so abruptly he could swear his heart briefly stops. It takes his hands, folding them above his head in a grip that borders on cutting. Jon only now realises that they had started trying to peel the skin from Michael’s thighs. Half-heartedly, dully forced to action by music that fades with every uncanny flex of Michaels’ body around his. It’s stealing the music. The violence.

“Almost finished,” it tells him with galling serenity. It doesn’t release his hands, though he tugs at them, writhes against its hold, panting protests. “Are you ready to beg yet?”

And Jon stops moving. He stares up at it, dazed. This limp and angular monstrosity, its cutting grip and face he still can’t focus on. The constant, ceaseless laughter that pounds migraine-like inside his skull, drowning out the music. The spirals that ripple under its skin, flickering like butterfly wings.

It wants him to beg. It sits astride his hips, simultaneously weightless and heavy enough to bruise, riding its cock with idle flexes of thighs without bones, and it terrifies him, and…

It wants him to beg.

“Please,” Jon rasps. He quivers as one of its hands releases him, moving to trace formless shapes down the side of his face. One long finger comes to rest under his left eye. He doesn’t quite dare breathe. He is tense all over, grinding his teeth together; he’s maybe ten seconds away from coming, and he can’t work out how that can be. How he can like this as much as he does.

“You do that very well,” Michael says gleefully. “And you’re so wonderfully…frightened. So much more than usual. A successful first attempt at cooperation, I think. That does bode well.” Its hand moves from Jon’s face to his throat, and this time he doesn’t try to slice himself open on its hands. He feels no need to; the hunger is faded; the need is all but gone. The flute is the barest desperate whisper at the edge of his hearing, vanishingly small, shrinking by the moment. He’s safe. The only monster left possessing him is the one he doesn’t actually mind too much. The one he consents to fear.

He clings to that instinctive horror in the pit of his stomach, that surges as Michael looms over him. He moves with it, seeking a rhythm though it scares him dizzy, drawing shallow, rapid breaths through exhausted lungs. He can hear the soft, helpless moans he makes with every exhale. Feels Michael…shiver in response. And suddenly, it’s enough; buried deep inside its uncanny form, he feels himself lose the last of his grip on control. Arches, crying out, and feels his nervous system buzz with alien laughter as he comes inside it.

He’s hazy after that. There is enough awareness for him to feel the moment Michael slides off him in a ripple that puts him in mind of a water snake. He hears the creak of a door, and turns his head to protest the immediate departure. But his mind is clearly not his own; he imagines a second figure in the doorway, stepping back as Michael advances on it, and then the door is closing behind them with a creak that almost resembles flute music.

Jon finds himself abruptly alone.

 _I should make a record of this_ , he thinks, lying dazed against the pillows. There is no pain; something coils through his veins, limbs, chest. Not quite adrenaline, not just the standard post-coital ease, not entirely relief. A distortion of all three, and other things. He doesn’t mind it as much as he should. It’s not unpleasant.

Above him, the bedside lamp casts odd patterns on the plaster ceilings; spirals, fractals in dull gold light. _This might be important for…research, or for future reference. There might be things I didn’t notice at the time. Strengths, weaknesses. Information I could use, when Michael decides it’s done with rescuing me. I should record this._ He closes his eyes, beginning to draft the statement in his mind.

 A while later, he wakes up. Blinks blearily at the morning light where it streams through his inadequate curtains. And then he remembers.

There is blood on the sheets. On the blankets, the pillow cases, rusty red smears all over his torso, shoulders, arms. One of his wrists shrieks with pain as he moves it. Jon gives an echoing shriek, cradling it to his chest. He doesn’t want to look too closely past the red crust slicing into his skin; he knows what he’ll see. The memories are vague, as distant as dreams, but he remembers taking the bread knife to his wrist. He’s lucky he barely started before Michael interfered. Lucky he never reached a vein.

He huddles in on himself, and cries. He couldn’t stop it if he wanted to.

He will have to treat the wound himself; can’t risk taking it to a doctor, when the cause is so clear, and he’s not in the right frame of mind to make up a convincing excuse. He’ll have to manage. Soon. For the moment, he hides under the covers, shivering like a beaten dog, sobbing between breaths. Only now does the reality of his situation start to sink in. He thinks about the statements he has so painstakingly recorded; the scarred, frightened people whose names he catalogued and forgot until he joined their number. Sergeant Berry in the trenches. Jennifer Ling and the unfortunate Lee; the former, who took a hammer to her own skull, and the latter, who bleeds perpetually from ruined eardrums. Others, who were taken by the savagery in different ways, ruining themselves and others. That could have been him.

He was lucky. God, he was so lucky.

In an unhinged bid to find some measure of calm, he starts counting his wounds, enumerating them, their sources and their histories, as if by cataloguing them he can also file away the pain.

Pock-marks up his arms: worm-wounds from Jane Prentiss, _like Swiss cheese_ , as Elias so eloquently put it. The jagged scar from his first encounter with Michael, when he made the mistake of threatening it, and it stabbed him in a manner he now identifies as playful. The ringed incision around his left wrist, still faintly oozing: a present from the Piper, the Grifter, the berserker musician. And the other wounds.

He’s covered in hair-thin cuts across his chest and upper arms, his palms. There are several on his throat and jawline; his fingers have two or three apiece, stinging like papercuts. Others span the length of the ribs on his right side, forming an indistinct shape, like an impossibly proportioned hand made mostly of knives, or shards of glass. More on his inner thighs; again, the dizzying hand-silhouette.

Not too bad, all things considered. The cuts are shallow. Thin as cheese wire for the most part, and none approach anything vital, or anywhere he can’t cover with sleeves, scarves, or gloves.

Michael must have been so careful. He didn’t notice it at the time; caught up in the pain, the song, the _need_ ; clawing at its unconvincing skin, digging deep for organs it doesn’t possess, bleeding under its too-sharp fingers. It could have killed him so easily. It probably wanted to. The fact that he appears to have suffered only superficial damage from its touch is…nothing short of a miracle. They could not possibly be more physically incompatible. It shouldn’t have _worked_.

Dizzy from shock and suffering, Jon wonders briefly if he should get it some kind of card to express his gratitude. _Dear Being That Calls Itself “Michael”: Thanks for showing up in the nick of time to stop me cutting my own hand off, and then very graciously not shredding me like tissue paper while we had sex to make the madness go away. Yes, I am aware of the irony involved in asking you to restore sanity to a situation. I’m sure you are too. But anyway. Very grateful, will be more careful in the future. Yours, Jonathan Sims, Chief Archivist of the Magnus Institute. P.S. To be completely honest with you, despite all the bleeding and trying to kill either you or myself, I actually did rather enjoy…some aspects of it all. Just so you know. It wasn’t all terrible. Only mostly._

No, he decides firmly. He is not to be trusted with writing a card. At least not until his mind returns to its usual, comfortable state of paranoid cynicism.

When he finally manages to drag himself upright, leaning heavily into the pillows, he finds a first aid kit at the end of his bed. It sits there; innocent, unobtrusive. Highly professional-looking, like something stolen from the back of an ambulance. He’s never seen it before in his life.

There is a note on top, written in a familiar, blurred calligraphy. _Get Well Soon,_ it says. The corners of the note are folded, bent, the paper beginning to warp in implausible directions before abruptly tapering off into plain…paper. As if something started to make an effort, on principle, and then just gave up.

“I know the feeling,” Jon mutters. “I could sleep for a week.”

He doesn’t, of course. It’s only just an hour after his usual time to wake up, and a matter of seconds to send Martin a text claiming that he slept poorly and will be coming in late to work. Martin responds sympathetically. They will all be sympathetic when he arrives; some more convincingly than others. They still feel guilty for doubting his innocence. Just this once, he doesn’t regret exploiting that guilt. With a sigh, he begins inching his way across the bed towards to the first aid kit.

He finds his tape recorder on the kitchen table, empty. There is no sign of the recording that caused all the problems. He doesn’t bother to look very hard.


	7. Neutral

Jon draws the eyes back onto his windows. Rather, he draws several on each; uncertain of how it was done in the first place, he draws in blood, in water, and in just the oil from his fingers. Then, in the corner of the glass, he draws tiny eyes in fountain pen, the nib sliding uncomfortably on the pane. It’s the best he can do. It will have to suffice.

He makes a mental note to buy new knives to replace the three that have gone missing. A bread knife at least, although the very thought sends another stab of pain through his bandaged wrist. He ignores it. He can’t cut sandwiches with bare hands alone, and there are certain sacrifices he is unwilling to make. This war may take his colleagues, his health, his passion, his sanity. It will _not_ take his sandwiches.

His commute to work is a quiet one. Nobody stands out to him. Nobody meets his eye. There are no odd smells or noises, no musicians with black-encased instruments, no calliope on the wind. Just the usual grey-faced Friday train crowd, headphones shielding ears, books and tablet devices snaring eyes.

He actually manages to find a seat for once. It’s a relief; under the layers and layers of padding and bandages, the blanket numbness of the painkillers, his wrist still aches. He may have to take it to a doctor. This no longer seems an impossible task, now he’s thinking more clearly. He’ll claim he was mugged. A stranger down a side street, cutting into his wrist in a bid to take his wallet. No witnesses, of course. Only the vaguest description that the police won’t know what to do with. It’s not an impossible tale, in ‘these dangerous times’, and who on earth would accuse him of having done the thing to himself? That would be insanity. He’d have to be mad. Berserk.

 _Yes,_ Jon decides. _First the Archives; finish a statement, feed the goddamn Beholding. Then off to a doctor._ It’s the clearest he’s felt in weeks.

He greets his assistants somewhat cheerfully; all three of them look at him as though he has lost his mind. Martin asks tentatively if he’s alright, to which Jon responds honestly: no. Not yet. But maybe in the future.

He finishes another statement. He feels worn out, like he’s just awoken from days in a fever; that weak, baby-deer stagger that speaks of a long, slow recovery. The distant spark of growing strength in his bones. He’s going to be alright, this time.

When he looks up to find a brand new door embedded into the wall by a cabinet, he isn’t even slightly surprised.

“Come in,” he calls resignedly. “There’s no such thing as ‘off limits’ to you anyway.”

There is no response, and the door stays firmly closed. Jon tries to ignore it for a minute or so; he stares down at the document in front of him, a police report that somewhat corroborates the statement he has just completed. It’s a futile effort. Soon enough, he finds himself standing, sulkily making his way towards the yellow door. He supposes it’s only fair that Michael makes him come to it, after everything. Still, he resents having to do so.

The door doesn’t immediately swing outwards when he touches the handle. This alone is an abnormality, and Jon hesitates.

 _That should open_ , he thinks. _Isn’t that how it works? We do all the work ourselves, we step willingly into your parlour and then find there’s no escape?_ He wrestles with the handle. Puts as much strength into it as he can muster, little though that is, and eventually the door begins to give.

Pulling it open one-handed feels like a mammoth effort; it fights him every inch of the way.

And on the other side, an absurd catastrophe.

The yellow carpet is streaked with dull wetness, rusty smears that blend into the black rug in the middle. The rug itself is uneven; something has tugged out of its linear path, rucking it carelessly. It is torn in places. The walls are painted in arterial splashes; Jon can’t look at them for long. They unnerve him, far worse than the corridor itself, with its distant, gentle leftward curve. They lack regularity. They break up the pattern. They don’t belong here.

Jon is stepping through the doorway before he can stop himself, Helen Richardson’s horrifying statement at the forefront of his mind. Glancing behind him, he sees his office. Mundane, unkempt, comforting. The door doesn’t close.

Ahead of him, the corridor stretches unto infinity, its papered walls broken up by torchlight (flickering or dead, glass glittering at the base of smashed bulbs). There are pictures on the walls. He knows what they should show: the corridor, unending, the fractal with its intestinal curves and branches, like some abstract, incomprehensible digestive tract.

All the pictures are identical. They show a white backdrop and a single word, written unmistakably in blood:

NEUTRAL

“Oh…god,” Jon mutters, helpless. He turns a slow circle; behind him, the door is still open, his office beyond it. Everywhere else, the stained yellow carpet, the ruined black rug, the broken bulbs and paintings and the single, accusatory word.

_Neutral._

When he finds his voice, he shouts. “Michael? _Michael._ Are you _…_ are you alright?” For the longest time, there is silence. And then, as if from a distance, an echoing laugh.

It doesn’t sound right. The familiar mad chuckle, distorted, delighted bubbling laughter, is absent in favour of something else. More in line with the hysterical giggle of the guilty funeral attendant, or the accident victim bleeding out as paramedics panic. When Michael actually appears from a side passage he could swear didn’t exist before, Jon can see why.

Its entire left arm is missing. Without meaning to, he finds himself wrapping his own free hand around his wounded wrist, heavy with bandages.

 _Revenge?_ he thinks, horrified. _Or…fair exchange? Did you pay the Piper for me?_

“What happened?” he asks, as Michael approaches in an odd, flickering movement. It changes before his eyes, flashing between the tall blond man and the creature with no bones beyond the ones in its outsized hand. One hand. Not the usual two.

“I would have thought that was _obvious_ ,” Michael tells him. It gestures idly at the walls, the floor. “Something’s been redecorating, I…can’t say I think much of its taste.”

“No,” Jon agrees distantly. “It was better before. Was it-” he stops himself. The question is a useless one; he can work the answer out for himself, from the savagery in the wreckage, the berserk smears of blood on the walls. The exacting nature of Michael’s injury. He knows exactly what happened here. “I’m sorry,” he says instead. “I didn’t realise this would happen.”

“No,” Michael agrees. “I didn’t really expect you to.” It leans on the closest wall, its spine bending in ways that Jon’s mind refuses to focus on. He feels a pang of guilt well up in his gut. Senseless, of course; Michael could and probably will one day kill him, and laugh the entire time. Michael is not his friend. Not his ally. There is no reason he should feel guilt for what has happened.

But it saved his life. Again. And now he feels guilty.

“I’m trying to work out what the paintings mean,” he says. “ _Neutral_. Is that a reminder, or a question?”

Michael gives a jerky, puppet-like shrug with its uninjured shoulder. “Who can say? It might be one, or the other. Or both. It might be something else entirely, I am…disinclined to track the artist down to clarify. The last time we met, it was less than pleased with me. And it will not be feeling _conversational_ for a while yet.”

“You fought back?”

“Oh yes.”

“Good,” Jon says, started by his own viciousness. “I hope you shoved that goddamn flute somewhere exceedingly painful.”

A chuckle, high and hypnotically jubilant. “I…gave as good as I got, shall we say,” Michael tells him. “Not that it matters; our musician wasn’t really trying to hurt you, it…was pushing at boundaries, shall we say. It didn’t actually expect you to fall into its trap. Nothing personal. You can relax for the moment, Archivist. Nothing will dare trouble you until the lines of allegiance have been fully re-established. They will all be wondering if I have finally chosen a side.”

“Have you?”

Michael blinks at him slowly. Its smile is self-satisfied, and familiar; it wore the same expression the night before. As it pinned his hands, weighed him down between its thighs and asked, laughing, if he was ready to beg yet. He hates that smile. And at the same time, he very much doesn’t.

Jon forces his mind back to the present. “Have you chosen a side?” he asks again.

Michael repeats its unnerving one-shoulder shrug. “That is an interesting question,” it informs him, obviously delighted with itself.

“Yes,” Jon agrees, sighing. “It is. Well spotted. Look, I…thank you. For what you did, saving my life again. It wasn’t exactly how I’d planned on spending my evening, but I agree that just this once I brought it all on myself. So…thank you. Is- Is that permanent, or will it grow back?” He gestures at Michael’s missing arm, trying not to feel too idiotic. He doesn’t know. Gertrude might have known, but he himself is utterly out of his depth in the open water, and his frantic doggy paddling is starting to become unsustainable.

“‘Grow back’ isn’t quite the term for it,” Michael says. “But it’s the closest your mind will come to comprehending, so…yes, Archivist. It will _grow back_. In time.”

“Glad to hear it.”

He is. Glad, that is; he’s surprised by just how glad he is. There’s no reason for it that he can place, and it would surely be to his advantage for Michael to get itself permanently crippled. Better yet if it did so while also crippling another extremely dangerous enemy. He shouldn’t be so relieved that the damage is temporary.

It’s the asymmetry, he thinks. Michael is all about patterns. Spirals, fractals, curving corridors, mirrors and illusions. The twists and turns of the mind. This kind of savage, careless amputation doesn’t suit it. Jon tries not to look too closely at the jagged edges where its shoulder ends, inside which he cannot see gristle, muscle, or bone; can’t see anything, his eyes sliding off the absence. He has a faint impression of spirals, but that’s standard. Whatever else lies under Michael’s skin, it’s not something his mind is ready to handle.

“Does, uh, does it hurt?” He gestures vaguely at its shoulder.

“Yes,” Michael says simply. There is a very stark absence of laughter in its tone. Jon finds himself wishing he hadn’t asked.

“Right,” he says. “Right. Well, um…thank you. Again. I’d have been a lot worse off if you hadn’t stepped in, so. You’ll be pleased to hear I put all the protections back, and I won’t be removing them again. Lesson learned.”

“That won’t matter in the end,” Michael tells him. It seems to have recovered from its brief moment of unnerving…absence. The humour is back in its voice; a tremble that suggests it might be seconds away from relentless laughter. “You’re almost certainly going to die. Probably at my hand, unless something else gets in first, which I would rather avoid.”

They’re back in familiar territory. The old fear is back, curdling like milk in his stomach; Jon groans, and slumps against one of the hallway’s odd walls, carefully avoiding the smears of blood. He slides down it until he can sit on the yellow carpet. It’s comfortingly soft. He rubs a palm over it appreciatively.

“You do know that saving my life doesn’t mean you get to jump the queue of people- _things_ that want to kill me, don’t you?” he asks.

“Queues don’t apply to _me_ ,” it retorts cheerfully. “And anyway, I don’t want you dead just yet. There is far, far more fun to be had from your continued existence. For the moment. I’m sure I’ve told you this before, but you seem to have trouble with paying attention. That doesn’t bode well for an Archivist.”

“Or maybe I choose to take everything you say with a grain of salt. You lie to people. You get inside their heads and draw insane fractal patterns with their grey matter. You can’t possibly expect me to just…blindly believe you, all the time.”

Michael laughs. It folds its limbs over and under, an unnerving performance that Jon pointedly looks away from until it’s sitting at his side. It leans its head back against the wall and deliberately cracks its neck; the sound sends a shiver up Jon’s spine. Mostly because he’s almost certain it doesn’t _have_ bones in its neck. Or anywhere other than its hands. Hand. Singular. _Christ_.

“Don’t _do_ that,” he says through gritted teeth.

It chuckles. “Don’t get complacent, Archivist,” it says. “We are at our worst when you decide it’s safe to stop fearing us. That’s when you stop being…interesting. And start being superfluous.” It pats his knee with a hand that doesn’t bother to pretend looking human. Jon can feel the sharp bits pressing into his trousers. Not quite hard enough to cut. Just hard enough to warn.

“Your advice, though unnecessary, is noted,” Jon says. “I’ll keep it in mind. Constantly.”

“Yes. You will.”

The silence they fall into is…not quite comfortable. The setting doesn’t help; Jon can’t help but notice that one of the bloody smears on the opposite wall is slowly dripping down onto the carpet. The corridor itself is very warm. Again, he glances at the nearby open door. A reflexive check. Just to make sure his exit is still operational.

He wonders if the Beholding can see him here. Tim and Martin had problems with their tape recorder, he recalls. Static, crackle, and eventual failure. Witnesses don’t last very long in here. It might be one of the few places he can’t be watched. Does that pose problems? Will his presence here be interpreted as a statement of intent? Of allegiance?

He has to know.

“This ‘struggle’ you mentioned,” he asks hesitantly. “Have _I_ chosen a side in it? Not…just observing? I mean, you…I… _we-_ ” He flinches away from Michael’s lopsided shrug.

“No,” it tells him. “ _You_ are the Archivist, and _I_ am something very different.”

“Distortion. The Spiral.”

Michael sighs. “You do like your names,” it says, reproachful. “I think it must come from the Beholding; it has always had an…inexplicable fondness for sticking labels on things. I tend to peel them off and give them back, but it grows…tiresome, sometimes.”

“The names help,” Jon says. “They help us to understand. They make difficult concepts easier to wrap our heads around. Look, just- how angry is the…Beholding going to be, if it finds out what happened? Assuming it does?”

“Hard to say. It’s not one of the more temperamental beings. Although it does draw the line at betrayal, as your predecessor discovered. Archivists who go rogue are dealt with _very_ strictly, it’s quite entertaining to watch. I suppose everything has its limits.”

“And what exactly does it classify as ‘betrayal’?”

“Why don’t you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jon snaps. “Maybe because I enjoy being alive? Sometimes? I mean, it’s a lot less enjoyable when there are monsters all over the place trying to eat me, or wear me, or make me hack bits off myself, or…whatever it is you want, I honestly have no idea.”

“That,” Michael says, “is how I prefer it. Surprises are so much better, especially where you’re concerned. The look on your face.”

“Which _one_?”

Michael considers this. “All of them,” it decides at last. “You are a constant source of entertainment, it’s very thoughtful of you.”

There isn’t much Jon can say to this. _Go to hell_ seems too prosaic; _happy to be of service, please don’t eat me_ is a bit pointless, and _can’t you find someone else to bother_ strikes him as ungrateful, given that it has saved his life several times, and he might need it to do so again in the near future.

“Could be worse, I suppose,” he decides. “Better you than the bloody spiders, or monsters in the dark.” In a moment of madness, he leans over just far enough to rest his head on Michael’s mangled shoulder.

It tenses briefly. _Good,_ Jon thinks. _You really do feel pain. Good to know_. It’s something he’ll dwell on later; might record, if he’s feeling particularly cornered. The Beholding would definitely like to know. He really should tell it.

For the moment, he’s just tired. The corridors are warm, and unlike poor Helen Richardson he finds that the heat actually does lend itself to sleep. Part of that might be to do with his injuries. They don’t pain him in here, but he feels their presence nonetheless. A weakness under his skin. An ache in his joints. The accumulated exhaustion of months without proper sleep.

And, odd though it seems, he feels somewhat safe here. The threat is present; he’s leaning his head on its mutilated shoulder. He can’t imagine anything else will come after him here, because there must be lines that these monsters cannot, or will not cross. The concept of _trespass_ is one they understand. He remembers that Melanie’s first statement confirmed that quite nicely. Amazing, the knowledge he’s been accumulating.

“Don’t mind me,” he mutters. “Just need a few minutes, then I’ll leave you alone.”

“Be my…guest. Is that how it’s said?”

“Yes, but not by you,” Jon says. “When you say it, the implications are highly unpleasant.” Michael’s laugh is a chainsaw-like buzz in his bones. It leaves him slightly dizzy.

He decides not to care. After a while, he barely feels it at all.


	8. Supplemental

What seems like hours later (weeks, months, years- time is strange in the corridors), Jon returns to his office, the yellow door clicking firmly closed behind him. It’s not there when he turns back to check. A glance at his watch tells him that it should be just after six o’clock, though whether evening or morning is unclear. The clock in his office disagrees, as does his laptop. Apparently, he’s barely been gone five minutes.

 _Typical_ , Jon thinks, and calls for Martin.

He arrives with Tim on his heels, predictably enough. They hover in the doorway. Awkward, uncertain; neither seems inclined to cross the threshold, and Jon wonders if it’s a case of not wanting to get too close to him, or some instinct that suggests his office might not be as safe as it used to be. Or it might be simpler; they might just not want to stay long. He can understand that. In their place, he wouldn’t either.

“Jon,” Martin says tentatively. “Your wrist.”

He glances at it and sees that his shirt sleeve has slipped back, revealing a rather distressing wad of bandages.

“Yes,” he says. “Um. About that.” He doesn’t know where to start, now he has them here.

“I noticed it earlier,” Martin admits. “But I knew you wouldn’t tell me if I asked, so I…brought backup. And I have an ambulance on speed dial, and I’m not afraid to call it. Don’t test me.” He looks terrified. Glances over his shoulder for support.

“Got mugged, did you?” Tim asks. “Some random stranger attacked you down an alleyway?” His sardonic smirk says, _go on. Lie to me. I know you’re going to._

Jon is briefly tempted. There is still a part of him that wants to protect them from what is happening, and what is to come; none of them know what they agreed to when they started working here. It’s not fair. They signed up with no idea of what would happen, and the small print in their contracts was so miniscule as to be illegible, if it even existed in the first place. If he could keep them clear of this, he would.

But they all signed the Institute’s paperwork, put their names down into its file, invited its eye upon them. And they have all recorded statements. There are no bystanders here.

He opens the top drawer of his desk and retrieves a new, blank tape. Clumsily begins to peel the plastic from its exterior.

“Go and get Melanie, please,” he says to Tim. “And we’ll need an extra seat, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Why?” Tim demands. “What exactly is going on here?” Martin tugs silently at his elbow, expression pleading. It’s hard to tell which of them he’s pleading _with_.

Jon slots the cassette into the recorder. “Tell her we’re having a council of war,” he says. “There will be no more secrets, no more...stalking, or mistrust. I apologise for my part in that, by the way. I was looking in the wrong direction.”

“Sasha,” Martin says quietly.

“Yes. Now. Go and get Melanie.” He hesitates. “And then when we’re finished, I think I’ll be taking the rest of the day off. Um. I need to see a doctor.”

Martin is openly relieved. “I’ll come with you,” he offers. “Might as well, I mean, I wouldn’t mind an outing somewhere normal. Without monsters or ghosts or…digging. Definitely no digging. I’m glad I don’t actually have a garden, because then I might have owned a shovel, and I’d have had to get rid of it. Sorry, that’s- I’m rambling, don’t mind me. But actually, how would I even get rid of a shovel? Would I just put it out on collection day? Does that work?”

“I have no idea,” Jon tells him. “But if you want to sit around in a waiting room for a few hours, I’d…appreciate the company. Thank you.”

Melanie and Tim arrive. Jon begins to talk.

*

There is a spider in his office.

It sits in the shadowy crack between the filing cabinet and the wall; there is a good chance it doesn’t think Jon can see it, but he’s been getting a lot better at noticing things recently. He ignores it for a while. There is still a significant backlog of statements to work through, and he’s trying to be more careful about how many he attempts in one day. He can’t afford to ruin himself. Not when there are so many other things that would be happy to do it for him.

Eventually he stands, making his way over to the cabinet. He stops, and addresses the spider. It twitches as he speaks; if it were human, he would have described it as a startled jump. Maybe it is.

“Hello,” he says, because Martin has told him repeatedly to be _nice_ to spiders, and it costs him nothing anyway. “I don’t suppose you could take a message to your master for me?”

It twitches again. He chooses to take that as a ‘yes’.

“Good,” he says. “Tell… ‘Mr. Spider’ that I gather it’s not that fond of the Lightless Flame, or Jane Prentiss’ worm creatures, which suggests we have some things in common. I understand there is a struggle going on. Maybe a war. I don’t really know enough about it yet, but I do know that this…Unknowing is not a thing I want to happen. So. Assuming I have understood correctly, and we might have the same goals in mind. Tell Mr. Spider that it is cordially invited to come by for a chat, any time it decides to help me stop the Unknowing. I’m ready to talk.”

Jon leaves the spider where it is and returns to his desk. Glances at the clock. It’s getting late; Tim will have left at five on the dot, and Martin soon after. If Melanie is still here, she’ll probably be safe in the library. He’s the only one around.

There is a tap on the door. In his mind, Jon can see the words, “KNOCK, KNOCK.”

“Come in, Mr. Spider,” he says, and the door swings open.

*

Jon spends days digging through his former employer’s things, looking for the statements he knows Elias hid from him. The things he wasn’t deemed ready to know. He hasn’t found them yet, but they’ll be around somewhere. Maybe down in the tunnels. There will be hundreds more tapes with Gertrude’s voice in them, and it has rapidly become clear that she was far more prepared to handle this war than he is. Even now, he’s not totally sure he understands it. He’s not sure he _can_.

He does know that Gertrude was prepared to go it alone, turning her back on the Beholding, hiding herself from view. Futile, clearly; Elias got to her easily enough. Her, Leitner, and who knows how many others. Running from the Eye is clearly not an option that bodes well for his continued existence. Luckily, it’s not an option he plans to take, any more than he plans to try and win this war alone.

Webs are beginning to form in the corners of Elias’ office, as the space is claimed by their newest…friends? Allies? Hard to say, but the spiders are coming, whether or not he knows what label to give them. He allows a few into his own office, on sufferance. They have been asked to avoid Tim, who hates spiders, and to watch Melanie from a distance, on the grounds that she may not like them much either. Martin is fair game. Serves him right for all the rabid pro-arachnid preaching.

 Jon pushes a box away from him, stretching. He winces as the newest cuts across his shoulders twinge in protest. Not as many, this time. Michael is starting to learn his limits.

“Box #3 contains a collection of self-help books and newspaper advice columns on the topics of social isolation and ‘getting a life’ outside of one’s comfort zone,” he recites. “Somehow, I doubt Elias was interested in that sort of thing. It seems more likely that he left them specifically as a jab at _me_. Particularly given that the last two boxes featured a helpful collection of resources for planning funerals. And, for some reason, a bunch of scone recipes. Those might actually have belonged to him. Hard to say.”

“There is nothing in this office that you were not intended to find,” Michael says. “It’s a game. One you will not win.”

“Oddly enough, I’d worked that out for myself.” He pushes the box aside and reaches for the next one. Easier, now he has the use of both hands again. In a couple of days he’ll be able to remove most of the bandages. He’s looking forward to it.

There is a scuffling from Elias’ desk, and a barely audible hissing sound. Jon opens the box.

“Are you still bullying them?” he asks, withdrawing a pile of cassette tapes. “Is there any point? I didn’t realise spiders could feel fear.”

“They can,” Michael says. “Though not in any sense you’d understand. It’s…muted. Briefly satisfying, but nowhere near as filling as pure, human terror.”

“Like a packet of crisps instead of a proper dinner?”

“Really, Archivist. The way your mind works.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.” Jon stands, making his way through piles of documents and unopened boxes to Elias’ desk. Michael has taken the chair with a glee that suggests it is treading on previously forbidden territory. Jon felt the briefest urge to scold it, but that faded fast. Personally, he’s tempted to give it the whole damn office, and let Elias sort it all out when he returns.

The desk itself is a solid wooden piece, its surface broken by deeply carved channels; fragments of wood litter the place like sawdust. An odd, spiralling pattern has been drawn with what appears to be a knife, or a knife-like finger. Despite the overarching shape, it is riddled with detours and side passages; Jon struggles to focus on it. Every time he looks, the shape seems to change.

Several tiny spiders are currently occupied with running through the carved fractal maze. Occasionally, they stop to make high-pitched hissing noises. One of them seems happy to huddle in place and quiver. Jon reaches for it with careful fingers, coaxing it into his hand and lifting it free of the maze. He sets it down on the floor where it scuttles away with palpable relief. When he straightens, the look on Michael’s face is reproachful.

“I was enjoying that,” it tells him.

Jon gives a wry bark of laughter. “I’m sure I’ll make up the deficit later.”

“Yes. You will.”

“Looking forward to it.” _I really am_ , Jon thinks, as Michael laughs at him, or at the remaining spiders, or perhaps at the universe in general. It’s easy enough to defy it in the daylight, while it still wears its human skin and pretends to be somewhat civilised, and while they stand on Jon’s territory, surrounded by his master’s protective gaze. The bravery doesn’t last. He is still plenty terrified of Michael.

And yet, somehow, they’ve turned it into an advantage.

He leaves Michael to the increasingly distressed spiders, kneeling back down next to another of Elias’ boxes. His shoulders give another twinge, paper-thin cuts stinging as he moves. These ones feel more intentional than the last; not an accident, but part of the experience. Jon has never considered himself particularly masochistic, but there’s always time to learn new things. It helps that Michael doesn’t hurt him for the sake of pain.

They combine fear and sex on an almost nightly basis, a heady mixture he can only barely handle; heart racing, body wrung out and battered, emotions overloaded. And afterwards, blessed numbness. A state of blissful relaxation that comes in the empty aftermath of adrenaline and unexpectedly fantastic sex, and Michael’s unnatural, dizzying influence. And sleep. He’s sleeping better than he has in almost a decade.

He kneels by the boxes (and winces again; remembers that last night Michael had him on his knees, knife-like fingers wrapping around his throat from behind, laughing as he screamed his way through a terrified, wrenching orgasm). It’s a vivid memory; leaves his throat dry, ghostly fingers constricting his windpipe for just long enough to make him cough. Annoyed, he forces himself back to the present. His hands shake a little, and that’ll pass. He has work to do. A war to fight. A game to win.

He might be starting to enjoy it.

*

“It just showed up on my doorstep last night,” Jon hears Martin saying loudly in the break room. “I mean, what was I supposed to do, leave it outside?”

Jon briefly considers walking past and ignoring the whole thing. But he is making an effort to be more involved with his assistants. To listen when they speak. Not to leave them trapped in their own flats for days on end, without anyone coming to check on them. He steps into the break room.

“Yes!” Tim snaps as he enters. “Yes, that is exactly what you should have done! Haven’t you learnt anything from all these damn statements? Back me up here. Something clearly unnatural and probably unfriendly shows up one night at your damn _flat,_ what do you do?”

 _Have sex with it, probably. Knowing my track record_ , Jon thinks before he can stop himself, and has to fight down a horrified laugh. It doesn’t matter anyway; Tim is addressing Melanie, and doesn’t care to know about his boss’ unorthodox methods for handling the monster that visits his home.

Melanie shows more sense. “Reach for the nearest camera,” she says promptly. “Or my phone. Record it, save the footage on the cloud so other people can get to it if I die. And then take a statement from it. But the footage comes first.” She throws Jon a challenging look, as if expecting him to argue. He wants to. Her priorities are in the wrong order for an archivist; she’s not running a ghost hunting show anymore, and their work does not revolve around YouTube hits. But this is not a fight he feels up to having so early in the morning, so he turns instead to Martin.

“Something on your doorstep?” he prompts.

Martin winces. “Uh…yes? A spider. One of those big, fluffy ones, you know, the ones I told you I liked? I think someone left it there. I was just in the kitchen, making dinner, and someone knocked on the door. I opened it up and the spider was there. It wanted to come in.”

“Oh, is that what it told you?” Tim says. “’Hello Martin, let me in, I promise I’m friendly. Don’t mind the giant teeth.’ Sounds perfectly reasonable. Let me guess: you fed it.”

“Just a tin of tuna,” Martin protests. “It ate the whole thing, it must have been hungry. And then I had dinner and went to bed, and it sort of followed me? It sat on the end of my bed all night. Just…watching the door. It was nice in a way, I felt very safe. I put out more tuna when I left for work this morning.”

“Martin,” Melanie says impatiently. “That’s not…normal. You do realise that, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure I even know what ‘normal’ _is_ anymore.”

“ _Normal,_ ” says Tim, “is very definitely not letting strange spiders into your house and feeding them tuna. I mean, a _whole tin_? How big is this thing?”

“I took pictures, here-” Martin unzips his bag and stops. “Oh. Well. Actually, no need for the pictures, looks like it must have hopped into my bag at some point this morning. _Hello_. Sorry about the bumpy journey, if I’d known you were in there I would have been a lot more careful. Are you hungry? I have ham sandwiches, I don’t mind sharing.”

“ _Jesus Christ, Martin-_ ”

“Oh my god, it’s enormous, I didn’t realise we got them in this country! Hold it still, Martin, let me get a video-”

Jon leaves them to it. Later, he’ll sit them down and tell them to expect an increase in webs around their homes, and spiders in the shadows of their furniture. There are several sitting over the door to his flat right now. He has asked them not to enter, but he suspects his neighbourhood is about to see an increase in arachnid presence. Same for the Archives. Theirs is a frail alliance; as transparent as a strand of spiderweb, buffeted by the breeze. But they want the same things, and that should be enough. For now.

Jon has to wonder what Elias will think, when he eventually returns (and he will. By now, this is no longer in question). His office will be webbed over, his files ransacked. He wonders what Elias will have to say about an alliance with the spiders. If he will approve. If the…Beholding approves. If it will approve of the steps he’s planning on taking next.

They need allies; standing alone is not an option, and observing isn’t good enough. Jon is prepared to accept any help he can get, monster or ghost or incomprehensible entity. The spiders are a good start; the Eye and the Web are united. He wonders what Elias will say when the Spiral joins them.

He rather thinks it’ll be a sight to behold.


End file.
